Pulmonary Fibrosis in the News

This morning, the Today Show featured a story on a gentleman suffering from Pulmonary Fibrosis, the disease that stole mom away. While it is fantastic to have the media coverage, I would like to see the "experts" like Dr. Snyderman focus more on the lack of an FDA-approved treatment for this horrific disease, and less on creating a stereotype of its victims as veterans and people who carelessly exposed themselves to dust in their younger years.

While the causes of Pulmonary Fibrosis are unknown, and it is currently impossible to determine how a patient began to develop the characteristic lung scarring, one potential cause is radiation treatment for breast cancer, which mom received in 1994 or 1995.

This disease kills as many people as breast cancer each year, yet receives far fewer research dollars. This needs to change, as does the misdiagnosis of patients due to the relative obscurity of this disease. They thought mom had asthma, and sent her away with inhalers for a few years before they reevaluated the severity of this disease. Maybe if her diagnosis had come sooner, she could have hoped for a lung transplant like the gentleman in this video is hoping for.

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