Posted on 04/07/2005 1:52:05 PM PDT by Hillary's Lovely Legs
Peter Jennings' lung cancer, which he disclosed Tuesday on ABC World News Tonight, may be in an advanced stage, a local expert on the disease says.
Most patients don't have their conditions diagnosed until the cancer is "so advanced that it can't be cured by surgery, and the patient has a poor chance of long-term survival," says Rita Axelrod of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital's Kimmel Center.
Details of Jennings' condition haven't been disclosed, but his hoarse voice and the fact that he isn't having surgery immediately "suggests he could be in at least stage III" of lung cancer, says Axelrod, director of pulmonary medical oncology.
In stage III, life expectancy for lung-cancer patients is 12 to 18 months, with less than 9 percent living for five years after their diagnosis, according to Axelrod.
Jennings, 66, World News anchor since 1983, shocked his ABC colleagues - and the broadcast world - by revealing in a staff e-mail Tuesday morning that the cancer had been diagnosed the previous day.
He said that he would begin outpatient chemotherapy next week, and that he would anchor when his health permits. Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson and Elizabeth Vargas of 20/20, among others, will fill in.
Jennings had planned to anchor World News Tuesday, but changed his mind late in the day due to a weak voice. Looking thin, he told viewers his news in a taped segment at the end of the broadcast.
Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in the United States, with roughly four out of five people who have the disease dying within five years, Axelrod says.
The five leading causes: "Smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking and smoking."
Jennings, once described by a colleague as a "relentless smoker," says he quit 20 years ago but started again during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Nightline's Ted Koppel "was always goading Peter to quit," says Bob Zelnick, chairman of Boston University's journalism department and an ABC correspondent from '77 to '98.
"Sometimes Peter was like a kid, smoking in the bathroom or stealing a cigarette in the hallway," Zelnick says. "At one point, he went to a hypnotist to try to get control of it."
The traditional course of chemo for lung cancer is in cycles of three to four weeks, Axelrod says.
Some people "actually do very well. They're able to work and enjoy life... . They only need to take a few days off at a time."
Meanwhile, the abcnews.com message board has been flooded with good wishes for Jennings, ABC News' Jeffrey Schneider says.
Jennings joined Wednesday in World News' daily 9 a.m. editorial conference call and spoke throughout the day with exec producer Jon Banner, but he didn't anchor last night.
In the wings. Though ABC has no succession plan in place for Jennings, news division chief David Westin has the luxury of a deep bench.
Gibson, 62, and Vargas, 42, already designated subs, would be on any short list. Vargas is considered a fast-tracker at the network.
Other possibilities: chief White House correspondent Terry Moran and World News Saturday anchor Bob Woodruff.
If ABC decides to go with network evening news' first solo woman, GMA's Diane Sawyer, 59, is the logical choice, says CBS Evening News interim anchor Bob Schieffer.
"I have no idea whether she would want to leave GMA, but she's always been the one I would have thought was the strongest woman anchor right now in television, and she works for ABC."
Since Tom Brokaw stepped down Dec. 1, Jennings has brought World News close to the top-rated NBC Nightly News in the Nielsen wars. (CBS Evening News remains a distant third.)
With CBS's Dan Rather having stepped down March 9, ABC is perfectly poised to make a move. Its promo for Jennings says it all: "Trust is earned."
Why does everyone pick just on smoking? I took up smoking just to spite a society trying to tell me how to live.
Why don't you want to live for yourself? I doubt that it's true that no one will miss you, but, even if it were so, life is such a beautiful thing and God wants us to live it to the fullest.
God is not going to take cigarettes out of your mouth. YOU have to do it, and it's easier now to quit than ever.
Do it for yourself. Do it for us, here at FR. We need your insight.
Any one know if Jennings has small cell lung cancer?
Yes, John. And Black Lung the coal miners get. And radon.
People get lung cancer and all the non-smokers can blame it on is smoking. First question "DID THEY SMOKE? DID THEY SMOKE?"
Well, several things cause lung cancer. Not just smoking.
No. Way. That's like shooting yourself to spite the gun grabbers.
I've heard your sentiments many times regarding the honesty and the chemo. I agree. Many cancers can be beaten, but the truth about inoperable cancer is that it will take you....and usually quickly. Peter shouldn't even worry about work now. He should be making all his final arrangements, and enjoying his friends, relatives, and anything else he loves to the fullest.
Don't worry. We all saw this article two days ago when it broke the news. Where were you?
Don't give up on yourself!
You CAN do this. It truly is a one day at a time thing. Sometimes it's a one minute at a time thing.
My father had a heart attack at age 60. He was in the cardiac care unit for 10 days. He quit smoking then. He smoked since he was a teen and was up to 3 packs a day. It's 14 years later, he is healthy and smoke free. Still craves them, but hasn't had one in all that time.
Don't give up! Get your doctor to help you if you need it and keep trying.
After years of heavy smoking, having little will-power and making several attempts involving nicotine gum, patches--with the help of a suspect X-ray and sugar-free gum, this month I'm 4 years cigarette-free.
Don't wait to be scared half to death, decide that >you< want to quit. That's all you have to do. You can do it.
It's great to take a deep breath and not wheeze. Food tastes better. My clothes don't stink.
If you smoke and you hate it--go for it. Put them down and walk away.
Very sad indeed.
I have a story about smoking that my dad still tells.
My dad used to smoke 2-3 packs a day, since he was 16. When he was about 32, I was 4, and I had seen those anti-smoking commercials on TV, which warned about how smoking kills people. My dad tells me that one day, when I saw him smoking in the living room, I walked over and asked him, "Daddy, why do you smoke? Smoking kills people, and I don't want my daddy to die." Then I walked off into another room.
My dad was so moved by this that he never smoked another cigarette, and that was 29 years ago. So if you have loved ones that smoke, don't be afraid to pull out the stops in order to get them to quit. You never know the impact that you may have.
I knew a girl whose mom died of LC. Horrible, horrible death. I don't wish this on anyone, not even "Peee-taaaah."
Compromise. It's about compromise, and what level of risk one is willing to accept. I have little empathy for the all-one-way or the other paradigm when it comes to "things indifferent" like smoking.
If by the time they find you have the big lung-C, it is often too late? Then why in the hell have I been advised to have chest x-rays done for the last 50 years??
You can always find exceptions to the rule, there are pack-a-day smokers who live to 100, sure. If you feel lucky, go right ahead. But noone can deny that the chances of getting cancer from smoking is much greater than if you don't.
I always think back to Morton Downey Jr. who was the most in-your-face smoker around. But once he got the lung cancer that ultimately killed him, he cursed the day he ever lit up his first cigarette, and he spent his remaining years begging people to quit, or not to start in the first place.
| Journal of Theoretics Vol.1-4 Oct/Nov 1999 Editorial |
Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer (According to WHO/CDC Data)*By: James P. Siepmann, MD Yes, it is true, smoking does not cause lung cancer. It is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer. I initially was going to write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective. (No, I did not get paid off by the tobacco companies, or anything else like that.) When the tobacco executives testified to Congress that they did not believe that smoking caused cancer, their answers were probably truthful and I agree with that statement. Now, if they were asked if smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer, then their answer based upon current evidence should have be "yes." But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is much less than anyone would suspect. Based upon what the media and anti-tobacco organizations say, one would think that if you smoke, you get lung cancer (a 100% correlation) or at least expect a 50+% occurrence before someone uses the word "cause." Would you believe that the real number is < 10% (see Appendix A)? Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer (see Appendix A). In fact, the data used is biased in the way that it was collected and the actual risk for a smoker is probably less. I personally would not smoke cigarettes and take that risk, nor recommend cigarette smoking to others, but the numbers were less than I had been led to believe. I only did the data on white males because they account for the largest number of lung cancers in the US, but a similar analysis can be done for other groups using the CDC data. You don't see this type of information being reported, and we hear things like, "if you smoke you will die", but when we actually look at the data, lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths worldwide and only 3% in the US.** When we look at the data over a longer period, such as 50 years as we did here, the lifetime relative risk is only 8 (see Appendix A). That means that even using the biased data that is out there, a USWM smoker has only an 8x more risk of dying from lung cancer than a nonsmoker. It surprised me too because I had always heard numbers like 20-40 times more risk. Statistics that are understandable and make sense to the general public, what a concept! The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. Some of the known risk factors include genetics4,5,6, asbestos exposure7, sex8, HIV status9, vitamin deficiency10, diet11,12,13, pollution14 , shipbuilding15 and even just plain old being lazy.16 When some of these factors are combined they can have a synergistic effect17, but none of these risk factors are directly and independently responsible for "causing" lung cancer! Look in any dictionary and you will find something like, "anything producing an effect or result."18 At what level of occurrence would you feel comfortable saying that X "causes" Y? For myself and most scientists, we would require Y to occur at least 50% of the time. Yet the media would have you believe that X causes Y when it actually occurs less than 10% of the time. As ludicrous as that is, the medical and lay press is littered with such pabulum and gobbledygook. Even as web literate physician, it took me over 50 hours of internet time to find enough raw data to write this article. I went through thousands of abstracts and numerous articles, only to find two articles that even questioned the degree of correlation between smoking and lung cancer (British lung cancer rates do not correlating to smoking rates)19,20 and another two articles which questioned the link between second hand smoke (passive smoking) and lung cancer.21,22 Everywhere I looked, the information was hidden in terms like "odds ratio," "relative risk," or "annualized mortality rate." Most doctors probably could not accurately define and interpret them all these terms accurately, let alone someone outside the medical profession. The public relies on the media to interpret this morass of data, but instead they are given politically correct and biased views. If they would say that smoking increases the incidence of lung cancer or that smoking is a risk factor in the development of lung cancer, then I would agree. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the need to use language appropriately in both the medical and scientific literature (the media, as a whole, may be a lost cause). Everything in life has risk; just going to work each day has risk. Are we supposed to live our lives in bed, hiding under the blanket in case a tornado should come into our bedroom? We in science, have a duty to give the public accurate information and then let them decide for themselves what risk is appropriate. To do otherwise is a subtle imposition of our biases on the populace. We must embrace Theoretics as a discipline that strives to bring objectivity and logic back into science. Every article/study has some bias in it, the goal is to minimize such biases and present the facts in a comprehensible and logical manner. Unfortunately, most scientists have never taken a course in logic, and I'm sure that English class was not their favorite. Theoretics is a field of science which focuses on the use of logic and appropriate language in order to develop and communicate scientifically credible theories and ideas which will then have experimental implications. As someone whom I respect says, "Words mean things." Let us use language and logic appropriately in our research and in the way that we communicate information. * * * * * Yes, smoking is bad for you, but so is fast-food hamburgers, driving, and so on. We must weigh the risk and benefits of the behavior both as a society and as an individual based on unbiased information. Be warned though, that a society that attempts to remove all risk terminates individual liberty and will ultimately perish. Let us be logical in our endeavors and true in our pursuit of knowledge. Instead of fearful waiting for lung cancer to get me (because the media and much of the medical literature has falsely told me that smoking causes lung cancer), I can enjoy my occasional cigar even more now...now that I know the whole story. |
In very high doses, asbestos is dangerous. However, not that many people were exposed to it, compared to cigarettes.
If you know the true answer to these questions, then answer one more: Why do you do it?
Congratulations on four years smoke-free!
As I said, I am an ex-smoker. And, that is what I had to do to convince myself to stop so I could override the desire. Since I knew I wasn't stupid, I had part of the battle won.
Once I stopped, I had to fight the desire (habit) to light up; to reach into the shirt pocket, etc.
I also cut back on the food because once I stopped, I knew that the appetite would increase, in order to avoid gaining weight.
That's my story.
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