There is a lot of information right now on Breast cancer awareness in the news and on the net. In fact, breast cancer is often in the news, with regular funding drives to raise money to cure it.
My question is, why specifically breast cancer? Isn’t all cancer pretty much the same? Or is there really distinct types of the disease based on which part of the body it affects? Wouldn’t a cure be applicable to all cancer regardless of where on the body it occurs?
Often I hear funding drives talking about wanting to cure breast cancer and other ‘womens cancer’. As a male that makes me feel a bit ‘left out’! My dad died of liver cancer. My mom died of lung cancer. In both cases the cancer spread to other body parts.
I suspect this is really a marketing ploy, more sympathy (and money) can be garnered by invoking breast cancer (who doesnt like boobs?). Similar to how charities will talk about ‘child poverty’ because talking about poverty in general doesnt bring in as much cash.
It boils down to the fact that the breast cancer movement has better funding and marketing. I guess you hear about it because it’s one of the most common types of cancer and the people that get it (mostly women) are very vocal about prevention, treatment, and hopefully a cure. Women are disfigured by breast cancer treatment, that’s got to be very traumatic. Men who get prostate cancer are less likely to get up in public and talk about it.
Ever since women started getting routine mammograms, the detection rate has been booming, and business is booming. It’s great for docs/pharmaceuticals/hospitals. They get to give long terms of drugs and treatment to women who may or may not need it, then advertise incredible survival rates and the whole thing just keeps booming.
It’s got to be one of the best things going for big Pharm/Docs. A huge percentage of women don’t need treatment, they get it and then they contribute to the good story that is being created around early detection and how wonderful the whole process is.
Breast cancer in particular is often sensitive to hormonal therapy, so no, treating breast cancer is not the same as treating e.g. lung cancer. By the way, men do get breast cancer; just much much less often as women.
Cancers are not all the same, and different cancers have very different treatments.
Anecdote: in the past year or so, I have been treated for both breast cancer and thyroid cancer (unrelated). The breast cancer responded to chemotherapy and radiation therapy (as well as surgery), but the thyroid cancer required a thyroidectomy followed by radioactive iodine to destroy whatever the surgery left behind. In fact there are different types of breast cancer, which require different treatments. My type is not the kind that responds to hormones.
Different cancers are different not only because of where in the body they first appear, but also in the nature of the cancerous cells. They grow at different rates, they interfere with the body in different ways, and they respond differently to cancer drugs. A “cure” might cure all cancers, but that doesn’t exist yet; as things are now, we have “cures” (or treatments) for cancers, not a cure for cancer.
Breast cancer USED to be a “silent killer” that people didn’t like to mention in public, because people didn’t think it was polite to discuss breasts in public. In particular, breast self-exams seemed to be difficult to bring up. This is arguably no longer true. (Breast Cancer Awareness Month was started back in 1985, and a lot has changed since then. Why, back then, you couldn’t even say the word “penis” on network TV!)
It is sometimes thought that because most breast cancer occurs in women, it used to get less attention and research money than health issues that occur mostly in men. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it accounts for some of the stridency and indignation you sometimes encounter on the issue.
Many people suspect similar things. In particular, the founder of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a drug company; many folks would prefer it if we spent less on “awareness” of mammograms and chemotherapy and more on understanding (and preventing) causes.
Breast cancer is also one of the most successfully treated cancers, so there are lots of survivors to be advocates for it. This may be one factor that plays into the successful marketing of it.
Cancer is pretty much just out of control cell growth. Cancer cells are damaged and instead of dying, they keep multiplying and creating problems. That’s it. Once you start getting more specific than that, there are tons of differences in the ways the cancer progresses and what it can do, and how it can be treated. Some cancers are generally very treatable (breast cancer is one of them these days, and prostate cancer can also be very treatable) and respond well to surgery or radiation or chemotherapy, and others have few effective treatment options or none. Some cancers are likely to metastasize, some aren’t. Some grow fast, other’s grow slowly. Breast cancer isn’t really all one thing, either. Some breast tumors respond to hormone therapy and some don’t, so a treatment that works for one person may not work for another. It’s that way for pretty much all cancers. Maybe a true cancer cure would work on all kinds of cancers, but that’s not how treatments for cancer have developed.
Thanks for all the responses. Gives me more to think about.
It just irks me, some of the marketing around breast cancer. Well, all marketing irks me but that’s another thread.
Especially when they talk about breast cancer and ‘other womens cancers’…
I assume they mean cervical etc, but what irks me is, my mom died of lung cancer. So is that a womans cancer deserved of their notice? Apparently not. So why should ‘womens cancers’ be singled out?
Because those cancers were/are considered shameful, or too personal to discuss in public, or even “defeminizing.” As annoying as most of the marketing is, at least it has come a long way in combatting those perceptions, at offering options other than full double mastectomy, at providing options for women who do get mastectomies, and so on.
Lung cancer does suffer from the “you brought it on yourself” stigma (when not all are a result of smoking, and even then, you’re still someone who deserves care), so I think they need better marketing.
Prostate cancer - well, the problem there is the apparent paranoia of many men at having a rectal exam. Yeah, like cancer is a walk in the park. I wonder if that isn’t part of the relative success at promoting blood tests for possible (and disputed in value) early detection.
I don’t know how it’s now, but the argument for years was that “all” (as in, the bulk) of research money and research effort went into heart attacks /infarcts, which was/is the Nr. 1 killer for men (the A-type = managers, people with influence), and that breast cancer, which is the Nr. 1 killer for women, was/is ignored in terms of funds and research.
(For the nitpickers: killer in terms of diseases; obviously people also die from murder or traffic).
Also, at least here, Breast Cancer Awareness is not only about early check-up and touch tests, but also in order to raise fund for research.
One of the statistics says that every woman (in the western world) has either a relative or a friend/ aquaintance with breast cancer (either dead from it, or amputation), because 1/3 of women is affected.
When breast cancer spreads, it can kill. And having a breast amputated is not an easy thing - esp. in our breast oriented society - for women to live with.
The only good reason I know of is this idea that whatever was thought of as “women’s cancers” used to get less attention and research, and therefore needed an extra marketing push. Affirmative action for cancer, if you will. I don’t know how true or untrue it is or was that there was a disparity, or whether it’s changed.
I think you misunderstand that. Lung cancer affects men and women, so there’s a lot of research in how to treat it. But some cancers affect only men (prostate) and some almost only women (Breast cancer is very rare in men). And the fact is that research for things that affect “only” women is still lagging behind research for things that affect all people or men.
Related: pharma companies are just now starting to realize that women have different bodies not only in term of lower average weight, but very different hormones, and other things (different fat/muscle ratio). This means that drugs tested on men can’t simply be calculated for other body weight and given to women, they need to be tested on women, too, for side effects. If drugs have a side-effect for stimulating cancer in the womb, for an example, this won’t show up during tests on men, who lack that.
(An even greater problem are children, who have again a different body, but on whom you can’t test with good consience, which puts pediatrians in a quandary).
I see what you are saying, but regarding the bolded part, everyone, male or female, has had someone affected by cancer in general in their lives. You could make the same statistic about any cancer, or any disease for that matter. And, when any cancer spreads it can kill. Again, why single out Breast cancer in that case?
At least when they started in the 80s, there was a definite disparity, looking at the numbers of how much money went into research for cardiovascular vs. breast cancer, and how many researchers - both neutral/ clinical/ uni and pharma - were working on it.
Again, because research in the other broad cancers is already happening. I think the most common cancer across genders is lung cancer, and not smoking helps a lot with that. And there are a lot of campaigns to stop smoking.
Similar for prostate: 80% benefical and removable without problems if caught early; deadly only because almost no men go to screenings.
Another thing is the age of onset: If your grandparent who smokes a pack a day dies of lung cancer in his 90s, you don’t regard this as a tragedy, but rather natural causes (and at his age, he would die of something eventually). Similar with prostate, which usually strikes way beyond 60.
But if your father dies of a heart attack at 40, or your mother of breast cancer at 45, we think that’s a tragedy, so we try to figure out treatments.
Are those the latest figures? Back in the 80s, breast cancer was Nr. 1, but in the last decades, heart attacks have risen. Partly because more women work in stressful jobs (and their stresslevel is almost always higher with the triple-stress of job, family, household), partly because more and more women started smoking and drinking (probably because of the stress). As the doctors and feminists said “The women are taking the bad behaviour from the men, instead of the other way round, that’s the wrong direction”.
