RAISE YOUR VOICE AS A CANCER PATIENT: Advocacy Letter Template

(Feel free to copy, update with your personal information , and send to our nation’s policy makers)

Dear Senator (or Congress woman/man) XXXXX,

As one of your constituents from XXXXXX, I wanted to let you know that I am deeply concerned about the current administration’s funding cuts to NIH. 

For the past XXX years I have been living with stage 4 lung cancer – ALK positive – a subtype that has FDA approved drugs that will keep the cancer in remission for a period of time, but not forever.  Government support for medical research has provided the foundation for the drugs that are keeping me alive, and hope for continued survival depends on newer and better treatments.  My patient advocacy group is working with oncology researchers to launch new clinical trials – but these are expensive and depend on multiple sources of funding.  Any reduction in medical research dollars will mean delays and possibly canceled trials that could have led to lifesaving treatments for me and so many other cancer patients.

This should absolutely be a bipartisan issue with the support of everyone in Congress.  Every person, regardless of their political views, has a friend, relative, or personal experience with cancer, diabetes, or so many other medical conditions where medical research has made a difference.  America has led the world in medical and scientific research and this is not the time to damage our leading role.  I urge you and your colleagues to reach across the aisle and do what you can to reverse these ill-advised cuts and to support the highest possible funding levels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Lung Cancer Research Program.

Thank you for considering this issue.

Regards,

(name)

(city & state)