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A cancer stigma killing thousands

The nation’s biggest meeting of cancer specialists unveiled several breakthroughs on Saturday. The horrible news is what’s not improving. Only a miniscule 4% of men and women at high risk of getting lung cancer from smoking go for a CT scan to detect it while it’s curable. That 4% figure has barely budged in a decade. Lung cancer detected before there’s coughing or other symptoms is at least 80% to 90% curable. People who wait until they feel sick have as little as a 10% chance of surviving. Cost isn’t the problem. Insurance can pay for CT (short for computed tomography) ...

Snore more teasing

Dear Annie: Growing up, my siblings and I would make fun of my mom’s snoring all the time. To be fair, the noise seemingly could wake the dead; she sounded like she was sawing logs every night. Her snoring became one of our favorite family jokes, and to this day it’s brought up on a pretty regular basis. Recently, I discovered that my mom almost didn’t go on a trip to Italy with a group of friends because she was scared that no one would be able to stay in her room because of her snoring. And this fear has contributed to some serious insomnia. I hadn’t realized the extent of ...

What would you give to save your world?

Elmo Cook knew nothing about it. He’d heard the sirens in the middle of the night alerting all of Abilene that something had happened, but when he tried to turn on the radio, he found that his power was out. And when he left for work in the morning, the paperboy had not yet made his rounds. As a result, Cook was one of the last people in town to hear about D-Day. The anecdote is from the Abilene Reporter-News for June 7th, 1944, and it offers a visceral illustration of how the nation has changed in the now-75 years since American and other Allied forces stormed beaches in the ...

Break the cycle of addiction

Dear Annie: I’m a mother to five beautiful children. I do not have custody of any of them. I’m an addict, and I refuse to raise my kids the way my parents raised me. I want them to have and see a better life than I did. Growing up wasn’t great for me. We were homeless. Sleeping in backyards in tents wasn’t cool. My siblings and I had to transfer schools all the time. I didn’t graduate from high school, although I did sure get a degree from the School of Hard Knocks. I had my first kid at 18 and gave him and my parental rights up to my brother. As an adult, I started smoking ...

Do Trump’s hawks speak for Trump?

For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point. If foreign policy were decided by my security adviser John Bolton, the president confided recently, “We’d be in four wars by now.” It was Bolton who ordered the Abraham Lincoln carrier group and B-52s to the Gulf and told the Pentagon to draw up plans to send 120,000 U.S. troops. It is Bolton who is ...

Divorce is tough on adult children

Dear Annie: I lived in a bad marriage for more than 25 years. There was mental, emotional and some physical abuse. I stayed for the sake of my children and planned to leave when they were out of the house. Now, my children are in their early 20s. I could not take it anymore, so I left their dad. My husband sought treatment for his anger, but I still am through with the marriage. My son is completely on my husband’s side and doesn’t understand why I don’t go back into the marriage. Granted, there were a lot of good times; if it had been 100 percent horrible, I would have never ...