My mother died at 59 of lung cancer.
You wouldn’t believe a comment I got on a youtube video talking about quitting smoking. They guy basically claimed that there was no evidence that smoking causes cancer. Sometimes you just want to smack someone. :rolleyes::mad:
In any case, I’m all for awareness and prevention of breast cancer, I’m just also for awareness and prevention of ALL kinds.
I don’t think it’s true that one in three (or 1/3 of) women in the western world get breast cancer.
No offense, but I’m not sure any of this is accurate. Do you have any cites?
I think it has long been *believed *that women have fewer heart attacks than they do. Rates of lung cancer in women have indeed risen as more women took up smoking, but I have never seen a credible source assert that heart attacks in women correlate to women in the workplace.
Oops, my mistake – this cite addresses yearly risk, not lifetime risk. But lifetime risk for US women is still only about 12%, not 33%.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Detection/probability-breast-cancer
A man at my racquetball club died of breast cancer. It happens.
On the doctors they warned against 3 contributing causes for womens breast cancer.
No, I don’t have cites. Like I said, part of the figures are from what I remember in the 80s and 90s, part is general reading like “scientists/ researchers announced today that the rate of heart deaths for women has risen from 40% something to 50% something in the last 5/10 years, making heart death the new leading Nr. 1 death for women. Most likely cause is the rise in smoking from x% to almost 2x % and the rise of alcohol being consumed from y% to a lot more%. Additontionally, as the number of women in high-position jobs (not the workforce general, but manager positions) has risen about 20% (or something) in the same timeframe, and because we know (as safely as we can know) that permanent stress can increase heart death - because that was why Type A men were at highest risk - we are saddened by this development.” No idea where or when I read it, but the general ghist was the same in different sources.
As for breast cancer, my impression is that there is still a debate whether the higher rate is due to earlier detection or more carcinogenic substances. Some studies show high risk for breast cancer in women who never gave birth (Whynot gave some links in another thread), and who took the Pill (Though these studies in the US don’t seem to support this, European studies definitly do; I guess the concentration and makeup of the Pill is different). Both have to with hormones.
Hormonal therapy during menopause, as well as soy, is currently unclear, with some pointing to pro and some pointing to con for cancer.
There are more pseudo-hormones in our enviroment in chemicals (affecting fish in the rivers for example, and possibly male fertility and embryo development). That would be another factor.
Maybe you misunderstand the purpose of an Awareness month (day/year) for a special cause, then? It’s not to diss all other causes, it’s to raise awareness for this specific problem. The rest of the time, we can worry about the other problems, but just for the moment, we are concentrating on this one.
Do you think the “Year of the Child” the UN declared took away from the problems of old people? The UN also declared a year for seniors, I’m sure. But you can’t raise awareness for everything at once, so this month, we look at Breast cancer, it’s risks and treatment and prevention. Next month, we look at Black History, what has been achieved, what needs to be done, and what we can do. The month after that, we will look at climate change, and then at world hunger, at AIDS, at violence against women, poverty in old age, …
First you learn that a problem exists, then you learn what causes it, then what you can do, and then you do it (hopefully). Oftentimes, repetition is necessary, because not everybody listens the first time around. So you have heard the message 5 times already, but Joe over there has never noticed it before, and for Maggie, it’s eye-opening to learn how she can palpate her breast herself.
No, it wasn’t. It was heart disease followed by cancer. Your memory is not serving you well here.
BrianJ4 - The only reason that so much attention is focused on breast cancer awareness is that women who cared decided that it wasn’t getting enough attention and worked very hard to change that. Of course, now that awareness is high, a lot of corporations and others have jumped on the bandwagon.
The same thing can be done for prostate cancer, lung cancer, or any other disease. November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Here’s a link to ways that you can get involved. Maybe in 2035, someone will be on this board complaining about all the attention being paid to lung cancer.
I’m sorry about your mother and your father, and hope that more awareness will lead to cures for all forms of cancer.
it isn’t just one month though, it’s all year that I see funding drives for breast cancer, and other types of cancer not at all.
Thanks for the link 
Some people believe a lot of awareness has already been raised for breast cancer - if it was ignored in the past, it certainly isn’t now - and perhaps the energy that goes into “raising awareness” might not be better spent on something else, whether that means improved research or breast cancer or raising awareness of some other problem. And you can also debate whether or not “raising awareness” is really effective in the first place. But that’s all moving into IMHO territory.
It did. 1999 was International Year of Older Persons. But they’re a few years behind the young people because 1985 was International Youth Year and August 12 2010 to August 12 2011 is International Year of Youth. Of course 1994 was the International Year of the Family, so you’d think this ground has already been covered. Some of you might think this entire concept has gotten ridiculous, and for them, I point out that 2009 was International Year of the Shark. (I’m not sure if the UN was responsible for that last one.) You can see an exhaustive list of these events here.
Marketing, plus everyone likes boobs and this is an excuse to flaunt about it in public and not be weird.
There are groups that consider the huge amount of money going to breast cancer to be completely unjustified.