UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology January 1, 2022 - Flipbook - Page 21
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
VALOR
IMPROVING CARE AND
DESTIGMATIZING LUNG CANCER
"This is about trying to get to a time when no one dies of lung cancer,’"
says Dr. Drew Moghanaki, Chief of Thoracic Radiation Oncology for UCLA Health.
Drew Moghanaki, MD, MPH, is on a mission
to dismantle three major stereotypes about
lung cancer: that it’s a disease that only affects
people who smoke, that it isn’t curable, and that
surgery offers the only chance for survival.
He describes lung cancer as “America’s silent
epidemic”—a malignancy that kills more people
than breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer
combined. About 230,000 people are diagnosed
every year.
“Our work is about trying to get to a time when
no one dies of lung cancer,” says Dr. Moghanaki,
a professor and chief of thoracic oncology
in UCLA Health’s department of radiation
oncology. “If we catch it early, we can save
people’s lives. And by that, I mean we can cure
four out of five people whenever lung cancer is
caught early.”
Lung cancer affects all sorts of people. This
includes people who smoked a lot, a little, or
not at all. According to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 10% to 20% of lung
cancer cases—20,000 to 40,000 each year—occur
in people who have never smoked.
Anti-smoking campaigns emphasize the
connection between smoking and lung cancer,
which has created social stigma against people
with the disease, Dr. Moghanaki says.
“We teach kids that smoking is bad because
smoking can cause lung cancer,” he says. “While
this is an important thing to teach kids, the
message has unintended consequences. It leads
people to think that people who smoke, or used
to smoke, are bad people, and therefore people
with lung cancer are bad people.”
There are problems with this oversimplified
approach, he says.
First, it inextricably connects lung cancer with
smoking, which fails to account for the tens of
thousands of diagnoses made in people who
never smoked, or who used to smoke and quit a
long time ago.
Second, it puts the onus for the disease
on individuals who smoked, without
acknowledging the deliberately addictive nature
of cigarettes.
And third, it leads to a marginalization of people
with lung cancer, that they somehow created
their own circumstances and deserve the
consequences, Dr. Moghanaki says.
“We physicians are also guilty for contributing
to this stigma,” he says, “We have been labelling
people who smoke as ‘smokers’ for years in
almost all of our communications with each
other.”
White Ribbon Project
A former UCLA Health medical resident and
his wife launched an effort in 2020 to change
perceptions about people with lung cancer.
Pierre Onda, MD, an internist who completed
his residency at UCLA, and his wife, Heidi
Nafman-Onda, created the White Ribbon
Project after she was diagnosed with lung
cancer.
A health educator and fitness trainer who also
graduated from UCLA, Nafman-Onda never
smoked, yet was diagnosed with stage 3
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