The idiot is saying that men are privileged, but not specifically those with prostate cancer. Obviously there’s no doubt that woman are more privileged in health matters, invalidating his argument that men are privileged and therefore inherently more likely to recover well from things like potentially fatal cancer without silly wastes like treatment, prevention and research.
Yes, not shaving for cancer is a silly gimmick, but prostate cancer could use a slightly higher profile and a bit of extra funding. Fun runs to raise funds, or “awareness” for breast cancer, easily the highest profile cancer, is equally silly and sequesters a far greater amount of health resources, contributing to making breast cancer the best funded cancer even while several other cancers which don’t effect women almost exclusively and which kill far more people struggle to get any attention because they aren’t sexy.
I refer you to this BBC article, which includes the following:
That makes half as many dying as new cases discovered, not exactly most people who get it dying of something else first. Also:
That makes, by my rudimentary arithmetic, more than a quarter of all male cancer deaths in the UK being caused by protate cancer, in that 10,000 is more than a quarter of 37,150.
The fact that it is, according to the (now former) minister for public health Cooper “mysterious” also implies that medical research would be more likely to be fruitful in terms of extending life expectancies.
This fellow’s argument seems to be that no-one should bother about prostate cancer until breast cancer is eradicated, and that it’s “selfish” of men to support fundraising efforts for prostate cancer. What a load of bollocks. What are we going to do, establish a global list of problems with a rigid order of priority, and then tackle them exclusively, one at a time, never waivering from a single goal until it is achieved?
Ass. How do we assign priority? By number of people affected? Okay, prostate cancer first. Oh, wait, let’s go with mortality. Now, breast cancer is waaaaaay down the list. Better knock off fundraising until we’ve tackled liver, colo-rectal, stomach, and lung cancers, plus diabetes, all forms of heart disease, AIDS, and… :dubious:
Apart from this, it’s fallacious to say that men participate in Movember out of self-interest. The only person I know personally who has participated did it last year because his father-in-law had just passed from prostate cancer. Because, you know, his wife lost her father.
Have a look at the figures for 2009, for England and Wales:
Of the 140,000 cancer deaths in UK England and Wales for 2009, 9,400 were prostate. Even allowing for a regional variation for Scotland and NI, you’ll be lucky to get 1 in 10 deaths as prostate.
Whether you care for it or not, he has a reasonable, logical point. Movember is a very good marketing campaign for fund raising for prostate cancer, but there are diseases out there that cause far more suffering. By all means you can disagree with the proposition that we should focus resources on the biggest problems, but trying to claim it’s an illogical position is dumb.
Your logic escapes me. Are you trying to say that we should only fund research on the “top 5” death - causing cancers? And just forget about the rest for now?
Do you suppose that each dollar that goes to prostate cancer research is a dollar taken away from liver cancer research?
You may be interested to know that it was only in 1993 that the Prostate Cancer Foundation was set up, in response to a perceived major lack of funding in this area. Prior to 1990, prostate cancer was really ignored, and there was a real lack of public awareness.
It might also interest you to know where prostate cancer research stacks up in NIH Research Funding: 74th place in funding for 2011.
I can’t say I fully disagree with the thrust of the piece- which the OP grossly misrepresents- but considering the disparity between breast and prostate cancer funding, his ire seems misplaced.
I would really hope that the logic for his position is pretty clear. Focus your resources on the biggest problems first.
And yes, I do think that there are finite charity funds, so that a donation to one is likely to decrease amounts available to others. Are you arguing that charity donations are unlimited? If not, what other outcome can there be? I would have hoped that opportunity cost was a well understood concept.
You can’t consider opportunity costs yet not consider diminishing returns. Redirecting every charitable dollar in the world to curing Cancer X isn’t going to do much good, because there are only so many cancer researchers, test subjects and treatment proposals to deal with any any one time.
I think Movember is kind of stupid as fundraising moves go because very few people look good with mustaches, and if you’re growing one as a dare or for a cause, you’re probably not going to be one of them. But the cause is good, and there are stupider things out there than bad mustaches- like trying to get people to donate to one cause over another by saying their first choice is stupid and unimportant, for example. Or that strain of he-man woman-hating I keep seeing in discussions of breast cancer or prostate cancer. Bitching that prostate cancer doesn’t get a fair shake compared to cancers that mainly affect women is assinine. Breast cancer and ovarian cancer organizations have worked their asses off after the disease was ignored for a long time. Treating their successes are discrimination against men is almost too dumb for words. It’s either totally ignorant or brain dead. Denigrating somebody else’s work is not going to make a lot of people view your cause more favorably, and that’s coming from someone who has a lot of problems with the language and promotions favored by breast cancer charities, not to mention the way they spend some of their money and energy.
While there is a theoretical limit to the number of donor dollars out there, charities are rarely in direct competition with another. Just because I gave a dollar to a breast cancer cause yesterday doesn’t mean I can’t or won’t give a dollar to a prostate cancer or malaria organization today.
So is 74th position too high for prostate cancer funding? Where should it be then - 145th? Or just cut the funding altogether and focus on something that you think is more important?
One of the big differences between awareness campaigns for breast cancer and prostate cancer is that bringing more attention to breast cancer can lead more women who are due for mammograms to get them, and mammograms have well-demonstrated benefits.
Prostate cancer screening, on the other hand, has no such demonstrated benefit. The USPSTF (the most objective guidelines, IMO) finally stopped recommending it.
Awareness campaigns can lead to increased political will, which can increase research dollars, and that would be great. But there is very little that the general public can do in response to increased awareness when it comes prostate CA.
And of course since he’s not a scientist, you should pretty much question at least anything he writes on anything scientific. For example, when he writes this:
Those men in Hanoi have racial, genetic, environmental, and innumerable other differences from people in the US which are not the fault nor the problem of men in the US.
I mean, this guy didn’t even crib from Wikipedia:
In short, his piece of work is a piece of shit. I’ll bet he probably tweeted it to his editor (I know, it’s hard to imagine he has one) while sitting on the toilet. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that he probably was paid for it, or the fact that people ended up reading it.
Just as an example, lets say breast cancer is 10 times “worse/more common” than prostate cancer.
I can see the simplistic logic that says it should get 10 times the funding or even ALL the funding till it is “cured”. But this thinking ignores several real life factors. If the cancers are somewhat different, that difference and the study of the more uncommon prostate cancer may be the THING that leads to a cure for breast cancer. Another is that with a decent level of funded study prostate cancer might be “curable” while for whatever reason breast cancer never is.
So, if you go with the send all the funds to the big name thing, you risk not solving your big name problem and/or possibly forgo solving some other problem that was actually solveable.
Funding just based on numbers alone is just too simplistic and narrow minded IMO.
You made an argument based upon focusing purely on one disease.
I pointed out no-one was suggesting you should.
Now you go for some meaningless glib one-liner.