Pink, as we all know, is the symbol of this cause, and for some reason football teams have taken it up as no other charity. In October, football players wear pink shoes and pink gloves, the referees wear pink wristbands, the coaches have pink headphones and the television commentators sport pink lapel ribbons.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I'd like to suggest we scale back the "pink awareness." It is soaking up all the energy in the room and diverting our attention from the sad fact that "awareness" has not reduced the number of breast cancer deaths.
Pink Causes
The big gorilla in breast cancer charities is the Susan B. Komen foundation, founded by Nancy Brinker and named after her sister, who died young of the disease. It has drawn the attention and donations of many corporations and sponsored many running and walking participatory events.
When Komen's 2011 financial reports were released, people were surprised to find that only 15 percent of the $472 million collected was spent on research. They probably would be even more surprised if they learned the "research" included evaluations of how Medicaid patients and women of different ethnic backgrounds were treated. These studies may have merit, but when the word "research" is used, I think most people envision something more, well, sciency.
In fact, Komen has raised more than $2 billion over many years, and even a small percentage of that is not chump change. The rest of the money, devoted to promoting self-examination and mammograms and helping women with breast cancer, also was well-meaning if not instrumental in searching, in the foundation's trademarked phrase, "for the cure."
"Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer"
The article titled above, was penned by two-time breast cancer patient Peggy Orenstein and published in the New York Times magazine on April 25, 2013.
I am printing a couple points from this thoughtful article in the hope that others will seek out the full piece, which deserves a careful read.
-- Orenstein quoted a cancer patient who had been diagnosed with a Stage 2 tumor (the
range is 1 to 4, with four the worst) and given a 70 percent chance of recovery. After
six rounds of chemotherapy and taking the drug Herceptin, the woman discovered that
the cancer had spread to her liver and that she was dying.
"People want to believe in 'the cure' and they want to believe that the cure is early
detection," the woman told Orenstein. "But you know what? It's not true."
-- Orenstein cited a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine article which, she said,
"estimates that only 3 to 13 percent of women whose cancer was detected by
mammograms actually benefited from the test." The figures quoted were 4,000 to
18,000 out of 138,000 annual mammograms flagged for cancer diagnoses.
She concluded, "That may explain why there has been no decrease in the incidence of
metastatic cancer since the introduction of the screening."
Me
A few years ago, I was one of the many women whose mammograms found a growth that was treated aggressively. It was vanishingly small, and I'm glad to be done with it. But every time somebody calls me a "survivor," I want to scream. I know women who have died of this disease.
I suspect that breast cancer may be analogous to prostate cancer in men. In recent years many more men have been treated for prostrate cancer, but many of the treated prostate cancers are probably ones that patients would have "died with" but not "died of" if left untreated.
Simply put, there are serious breast cancers and serious prostrate cancers, and nobody is really sure how to distinguish these from the much larger numbers of less serious cases. I'd like more medical research to help clinicians make those distinctions.
Back to Football
Another interesting point in Orenstein's early 2013 article, which hit home as I read it again today, was this:
"Having football players don rose-colored cleats, for instance, can counteract bad press
over how the N.F.L. handles accusations against players of rape or domestic violence."
Prescient, that.
If I had my druthers, we'd plow lots more money into scientific cancer research but lay off the "awareness" campaigns and concentrate patient support programs on women whose breast cancer has metastasized and who truly need the help.
I'd also like to see the football players wearing gray in November to promote serious research
into Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of old-age dementia. Moving forward on that would improve many lives as the Baby Boomers grow older and would save the world untold medical expense.
No comments:
Post a Comment