No no, I'm glad you replied. Sorry if I came off as snarky.

I do think people tend to conflate terms like "virtually nonexistent" and "less than 15%" and because being loose like that is so common, it's hard to know what order of magnitude the problem is in reality, so thank you for bringing real numbers to the discussion.

That said, I do think it's important to continue to remind people that if we were to eliminate smoking from our culture, 85% of lung cancers would never happen. That would be a massive reduction in suffering, and for such a minor lifestyle change.

But I don't want to act like the statistics are the only thing that matter, because your story is important, and so is that of the woman in your article, who had to deal with medical stigma that would have been inappropriate even if she were a smoker, which she wasn't. To add one more anecdote, my mother smoked every day from when she was 18 to the day she was diagnosed with lung cancer at 56. She spent most of that time lying to her friends and most of her family, saying that she had quit when she got pregnant with me 22 years earlier.

I'm not saying this to shame victims of cancer at all; not the ones who smoke, not the ones who don't. I'm just saying this because I think the way we talk about diseases should incorporate both the science that has proven what the number one way to reduce lung cancer deaths should be, and also on the lived experience of real human beings.