American Cancer Society discussion questions guide

Three numbered questions arrive under one heading, and they are not three parts of one answer. The first is a referral decision about one person you are asked to imagine. The second is population epidemiology plus health policy. The third is a research appraisal. Each wants a different unit of analysis, a different kind of evidence and a different register, and the commonest weak post answers all three as a tour of what the American Cancer Society does. Write them as three short sections with their own headings. That alone separates a post that answers the prompt from one that circles it, because the moment the sections are labelled you can see whether the second one is still talking about services when it should be talking about incidence. Treat the numbering as the structure the marker will read against, not as an ordering suggestion.

Check the statistic in the prompt before you build an answer on it. The question states an estimated 1.5 million new cancer cases each year over the next decade. That projection is now well behind the published figures: the American Cancer Society projects 2,114,850 new cases and 626,140 cancer deaths in the United States for 2026, having crossed two million for the first time in 2024. Using the prompt's number uncritically is the clearest signal you did not open the source. The stronger move is to name both — the figure the question assumes and the figure currently published — and treat the gap as part of the answer, since an ageing and growing population is one of the drivers the second question is asking you to identify in the first place. Say where your figure came from and which edition it is, because these projections are reissued every January.

The second question asks about incidence and mortality rates together, and they are not one variable. Incidence counts diagnoses, so it responds to exposure, to population age structure, and — this is the part that catches people — to how hard you look. Expanding a screening programme raises measured incidence while lowering mortality, because it finds disease that would otherwise have surfaced later or never. Mortality responds to earlier detection and to treatment. A policy answer that says screening will reduce both figures is wrong in a way that reads as fluent, and it is the single most common error on this prompt. Say which of the two figures each policy you propose is expected to move, and in which direction, and the answer becomes defensible. Prevention policy lowers incidence over years; screening policy raises it within months while cutting deaths later. Those are different sentences.

The first question hides its work in two words: "and why". A recommendation is only as good as the barrier it removes, so decide what your imagined friend or colleague is actually stuck on before you name a service. Someone treated ninety miles from home has a lodging problem, and Hope Lodge exists for exactly that — free accommodation near treatment centres, offered regardless of income. Someone who cannot drive after infusion has a transport problem. Someone frightened at two in the morning has an information problem the 24-hour helpline answers. Name the person's constraint, then the programme, then why that programme fits it. A list of everything the Society offers answers a question nobody asked and leaves the "why" unspent. Then say what you would tell them to do first, and who would make the call — the friend, the caregiver, or the treating team. A recommendation with no owner is advice nobody acts on.

The third question asks what impact a research programme will have, which is future tense and therefore easy to overclaim. Pick a currently funded programme rather than one you remember, and say plainly what stage it is at — mechanism, early trial, validation — because the honest ceiling on your impact claim follows from that stage. A programme still establishing that a marker exists cannot yet be said to change treatment; one in comparative trials can be discussed in terms of what it would displace. Discuss impact on prevention or treatment specifically, as the prompt asks, and separate what the research has shown from what its authors hope it leads to. That separation is the whole appraisal. Name the funding mechanism and the institution as well, since both are on the ACS listing and both make the programme identifiable to anyone checking your claim.