#LCSM Chat Topic 1/11: Defining “hope” for lung cancer
Ten years ago, patients diagnosed with lung cancer did not have much hope for effective treatment. Now targeted therapy, immunotherapy, and other treatment innovations offer hope that many more lung cancer patients might live for years beyond the old survival expectations.
Yet even with all the advances in medical care, not all lung cancer patients have access to the best treatment options, metastatic lung cancer patients are still not curable, and lung cancer patients still die.
Does this mean we have no hope? No!
Hope means a lot of things. Hope can be as simple as finding comfort in the face of pain, or looking for the good in each day despite dire circumstances—it gives the person some control amidst the unknown. You beat cancer by how you live—that’s a win regardless of the health outcome. In contrast, false hope is telling someone that something will come true when you can’t know whether it will happen; in the world of metastatic cancer, such “hope” often leads people to make different choices than they might have made had they known the truth, and they might lose some valuable living time in the process.
Please join us on January 11 at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific, for our next #LCSM chat, where moderator Janet Freeman-Daily (@JFreemanDaily) will lead our discussion about defining hope using the following questions:
- T1: How do you define “hope” for lung cancer? Does the definition differ for patients, caregivers, doctors, researchers?
- T2: What is your definition of “hope” in cases where lung cancer is not curable?
- T3: Has your definition of “hope” for lung cancer patients changed with time? If so, how?
- T4: How can we help others find “hope” when they have none? What have you tried that worked?
Please remember to include #LCSM in ALL your tweets so the other chat participants can see them. You can read a primer on participating in the chat here. Hope you’ll join us!
#LCSM 
This is a good question or topic. Many late stage lung cancer patient go all the way doing everything they can to travel to US for last hope for a longer survival who would only end up disappoint and lost much of the money but that is the hope for them to always wish a miracle happen. Indeed, person like Iung cancer patient Linnea does meet the miracle but the odd is really low.