Category: Health and Wellness
It's breast cancer awareness month, which seems to last all year. I understand some women get breast cancer, but why can't finding a cure for cancer be for EVERYBODY, regardless of where it originated? Last I heard, if anything more men get prostate cancer, and you don't see a lot of campaigns aimed at them. In France it is the same, according to an article in PARIS MATCH, 60000-70000 men with prostate cancer compared to 40000 women with breast cancer, but the French are conducting a trial of a select group of cancer patients receiving additional chemotherapy along with the standard to test the standard treatment vs that with the additional chemo.
I don't like my tax dollars being used for a "Find the Cure" stamp at the post office. I intentionally don't buy pink ribbon products. I will not do the Avon Walk, nor support Susan G Komen, although I do intend this year to do a Leukemia Society walk. I fail to see why women with breast cancer are regarded as so much more important then men with colorectal cancer or children with neurological cancer. One of the pediatricians at my daughter's clinic died of cancer in her kidneys, of all places. She was 58.
Now I don't want a society like Afghanistan, where a house without a son is considered cursed and even a girl being passed as a boy, or fake son, is regarded as better than no son. But I don't support a society where womens' rights & womens' health causes should dwarf society as a whole. Why is it the only cancer preventive is one to prevent a cancer that is sexually transmitted (cervical cancer)? This is an outrage!
Well, I'm not totally sure on the last thing you said, but I'm wondering if it has to do with people being sexually active, sometimes even casually. HPV can be transmitted sexually, and some strains of that can also lead to cancer. Not saying of course that everyone who has that vaccine is or will be sexually active, but having that vaccine might be one way of preventing the more dangerous possibility of cancer happening from HPV. Even then, I don't know how successful it actually is, and I don't plan to be getting that vaccine myself.
I never actually thought of how much emphasisis is put on breast cancer, and now that I've read your post and am thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense. I am one who has been buying pink ribbon products when I see something I want/need and it happens to be one. While I don't mind supporting finding a cure for any kind of cancer and so don't know that I will totally stop buying them, I do agree that that money should be going to research for all kinds of cancer and not just one. I was going to make a list of commemorative and awareness holidays to put up on my new schedule board, but now I'll not include that it's breast cancer awareness month. If they're going to have an awareness month for cancer, they should have it for all kinds of cancers.
The difference between breast cancer and other cancers though is that we have the ability to detect signs of breast cancer ourselves, whereas many (most) other forms of cancer are invisible and often aren't detected until it's too late.
Awareness isn't there to make people aware that x number of women a year contract breast cancer, it is there to make those women aware of the steps they can take to ensure their cancer is detected early enough to receive effective treatment.
Do you check your breasts, for instance? Are you aware that an inverted nipple, or a leaking breast (for women who have not recently given birth) can be an early sign of breast cancer?
It is all these things that make early detection, and consequently early treatment possible.
Men can't inspect their prostates, children can't inspect their brains, women can inspect their breasts...
I was wondering about that. I personally have not been into the raise awareness things too much because they tend to pose problems without encouraging innovation or presenting solutions, but I did know the breast cancer thing was one of survival: apparently women can detect it themselves and can even survive. One breast cancer survivor I worked with was surprised I didn't know so many made it. She is a survivor and when I learned it I said something like "Oh wow, you made it! That's great you actually survived!" to which she forthrightly told me most women now survive it and can live healthy lives. So maybe it's because at least for that particular one, their chances of survival are greater, whereas as a guy, most the cancer I could get I'm pretty much dead meat save pumping out exhorbitant amounts of cash on high-investment low-return treatments. Granted my medical knowledge is pretty limited, but I guess I thought it was simply because their chances of making it are higher. So they go ahead and make it known, since at least some can make it out alive, as it were.