[freeflight]

As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients.

They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking.

What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on.

But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group.

The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.