Studying lung cancer

In the USA, lung cancer, which accounts for 13% of all cancers and 29% of all deaths, was one of the few cancers to decline in incidence in recent years. However, this has little to do with medical treatment or advances, but correlates directly with the decline in smoking. The progress conventional medicine has actually made in treating lung cancer are small increases in short-term survival: the one-year survival rate increased from 34% in 1975 to 41% in 1996, and the five-year survival rate increased from 12% to 14% during the same time period. Lung cancer is almost always fatal with conventional treatment.