I’ll admit that I’m turned off by the omnipresent crush of pink. I feel like my donation is as likely to go towards creating an ocean of pink tchotkes or suing someone for using the color pink as it is towards anything actually useful. I don’t need pink soup cans shoved at me either (buy ME and a penny will go towards cancer!). The whole thing feels more like merchandising than medicine.
For prostate cancer and other men’s health awareness, Movember is becoming increasingly popular. Seems half of Montreal’s men were sporting mustaches last November (a hideous sight to behold…I hate mustaches…my husband grows his, which severely reduces his chances of getting laid for a month!) and there were all kinds of fundraisers. It helped that the Canadiens got in on it too; having sports stars voluntarily create awareness is pretty cool.
My breast cancer awareness fundraising complaint is dragonboat clubs. I participate in dragonboating and there are a LOT of teams made up of breast cancer survivors, or even people actively going through treatment. These ladies are amazing and impressive and inspriring…but…they all fundraise. All. The. Time. Which is awesome, except that they always fundraise at dragonboat events, which means they are always trying to hit up the same groups of people. At the larger festivals you might have 5 or 6 teams trying to sell you ribbons, pins, bracelets and water bottles, and they’ll pretty much hawk this stuff to you every time you walk by. As much as I want to encourage them, I can’t afford to, and it gets frustrating and annoying. 
I hate the pink. Not the cause – the damn color. Why, oh why, did they have to go with pink? It’s so girly, in a little-girl sort of way.
I can’t say I’m any fonder of cancer, of course.
Let me know when NFL players are wearing special blue shoes, gloves and towels in support of prostate cancer. Or when nearly every product you can think of is released in a special prostate cancer support blue color.
Probably not likely because the NFL doesn’t need to reach out to male fans and it is trying to reach more women. Demographically prostate cancer isn’t a bad idea for the NFL. If the prostate cancer groups can get enough attention and convince the NFL there’s something in it for them, the NFL will do it. If not, not. Same goes for everything, really.
Now, that’s a little extreme: the entire NFL doesn’t need to get prostate cancer. 
I guess tits (which are visible and, if one is so inclined, fun to look at) have a better agent than prostates do (not visible, probably not fun to look at even IF one is so inclined).
Very very distantly related to the OP, concept-wise: Back in my college days, a lot of local businesses / restaurants had by the cashier a bin containing starlight mints (those red/whilte striped peppermints wrapped in plastic). You were supposed to toss a coin or two into the bin and take a candy.
Well, the sign explaining what they were for was something like this:
please donate to help
RETARDED CHILDREN
Naturally, we all referred to the mints as Retarded Children. “Wait, lemme grab a retarded kid to freshen my breath”.
Why yes, I do expect to go to hell, why do you ask?
I am totally with the OP on the grammatical annoyance. My brother committed suicide almost 3 years ago. Last week someone asked me if I knew there was a “suicide walk” in our nearby big city. Come again? Oh, I know it was a walk to raise money for suicide prevention or to raise awareness of the problem of suicide or just to show support for those affected by suicide, but “suicide walk”? Really?
Is there any evidence that it could have been better treated earlier? As I understand it, the movement really took off in the early 80’s and spent a significant amount of time fighting the paternalistic attitudes of the doctors. But that attitude wasn’t specific to breast cancer, it was a generally accepted component of medical culture that cut across gender and disease.
More specifically, I don’t think treatments today are better because medicine has taken a turn for towards the more holistic, whole patient concept of disease that validates a persons decisions about their body and seeks to remove shame as a component of disease (all lofty, worthy aims), but because of the advent of speedy and readily available genetic tools to aid in research. It changed the prevailing notion that the best treatment for all cancer was to act fast, cut it all out, and pump a person full of chemo, and allowed for the development of more targeted therapies.
I have a bit of a problem with this as well, but not nearly as much as I have with the near idolization of breast cancer survivors (though I’m not certain this is limited to breast cancer). No doubt the experience has given them a different perspective on life and it’s likely to be worth hearing. But the idea that they are heroes who battled the disease armed solely with a powerful will to live and an unwillingness to give up is pervasive and, IMHO, really quite sickening. Because they lived they’re what, more worthy of our praise than the poor people who are actually dying or died of the disease. Those people didn’t fight hard enough? Didn’t love life enough? Didn’t have a positive enough outlook?
What gets lost is that they survived because, in a relative sense, they were the lucky ones. Lucky to to have a more indolent form, or have it detected earlier, or have a better response to chemo, few mets, etc. They survived because life dealt them a slightly less shitty hand than someone else.
Then there was the sign I once saw: DONATE TO ILITERACY IN INDIANA.
Yes, with “illiteracy” misspelled.
I actually told this story at lunch today..
When I was in college, I participated in a 5k run called the “Run for Sickle Cell.”
I used to love wearing that shirt.
Thanks for this. My Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer yesterday. I’ve got some shopping to do.
-D/a
I couldn’t possibly say and it’s certainly not all one or the other. There’s been more progress with breast cancer than many other cancers and publicity has certainly helped with that, but it also just seems to be more treatable than some other cancers.
Doesn’t MLB do something around Father’s Day?
You want to talk about a mixed message? I’m right now drinking vodka coolers out of a pink-trimmed can in support of breast cancer survivors. Of course, the drink is made with glucose-fructose (high fructose corn syrup in the US) which is high octane cancer fuel. And how my getting drunk is supposed to benefit breast cancer survivors is a mystery to me. “Hey baby, nice tit!” maybe? Booze and cancer. Great combination. Couldn’t be more winning if Charlie Sheen’s face was on every can.
There may not be yogurts and soups and t-shirts, but there are romance novels with teal ribbons on them. And since my mother is an ovarian cancer survivor, she checked into it. I think something like twentyfive cents per book went to ovarian cancer.
So I decided not to feel guilty about borrowing the book from the library.
Romance novels? Seriously? Good grief :rolleyes:
Wish cell phone manufacturers and the cell service companies would each pick a non-breast cancer to donate a portion of their income to. Even a tiny percentage of their yearly intake would do an enormous amount of good.
Well, Telus employees did participate in Movemberlast year, donating $75 000 from fundraising. This past March they donated $100 to the Campaign for Prostate Health for every switch to a smartphone that users in Edmonton made. The total donation amounted to $200 000. It’s a start. There may be more; I just vaguely recalled these two and googled them but I didn’t exactly do an exhaustive search.
I think Bell has a great opportunity to get on board with prostate cancer awareness this year with the Habs and Movember; the two organizations are heavily intertwined (they play at the Bell Centre!) with the team already generating so much advertising for the telecom company. When the most popular players on a team are onboard with this stuff already, you’d have to be a complete failure at marketing to not find a way to generate goodwill through fundraising and money for yoursellf! We’ll see next month what happens. In the meantime, it’s pink!
Why does breast cancer get more attention than prostate cancer? Because breast cancer kills younger individuals.
Prostate Cancer
Incidence: 156.0 per 100,000 men
Age at diagnosis:
20-34 0.0%; 35-44 0.6%; 45-54 9.1%
Deaths: 24.7 per 100,000 men
Median age at death: 80 years of age.
Age at death:
20-34 0.0%; 35-44 0.1%; 45-54 1.4%
Breast Cancer
Incidence: 124.0 per 100,000 women
Age at diagnosis
20-34 1.9%; 35-44 10.2; 45-54 22.6%
Deaths: 24.0 per 100,000 women
Median age at death: 68 years of age.
Age at death:
20-34 0.9%; 35-44 6.0%; 45-54 15.0%
Cite.
Kimera - interesting statistics!
There’s a term, “disability-adjusted life year” which talks about how many years of life in general are shaved off by a condition. Any figures for that for these types of cancer?
Of interest: many years ago, as a volunteer at a hospital, I worked with a little boy - maybe a year or two old… who was being treated for prostate cancer. Egad. I have no idea how he did long-term (I know he had a urostomy as part of the surgery).
Back to semantics: back in the middle of Obama’s health care fight (and when did we start spelling “healthcare” as one word, anyway?), I got really exasperated with the phrase “health care reform.” It’s not “health care reform,” it’s “health care INSURANCE reform.” We’re not talking about the quality of health care provided by our doctors and nurses – we’re talking about PAYING for it!
Re fundraising: I suppose I often look stingy when I decline to put money in a jar next to a cash register or buy a ticket that sends a dollar to some good cause. It’s just that I never know how long the money is going to be sitting there and whether it actually gets to the cause it’s designated for. Since Mississippienne told us about Charity Navigator back in 2004, I have been especially careful about my charitable giving.
I also hate the “Buy X and we will donate Y amount to Z cause.” Just donate directly to the cause!