Nope. Numbers at 40. Women have a 1.44% for breast and a .20% of colorectal. Men have a insigificant chance for breast and a .23% chance for colorectal.
That’s CDC and its actually “chance you’ll have cancer in the next ten years at 40.”
Colorectal doesn’t come close.
No, I’m testing the implied claim that breast cancer gets special attention because it strikes a lot of people who are under 40.
I agree. So what?
Actually I was asking about rates for people under 40 which was based on your earlier statement. However, I did check the CDC tables for ages from 30 to 40 and I do concede that according to the CDC tables, for people in the 30 to 40 year age group, breast cancer is roughly 3 times more common than colorectal cancer.
I still believe that political correctness is a big factor, but I am willing to concede that incidence in people under the age of 40 may play a significant role too.
I’m coming in late, but here’s my two cents
Having been active for years in cancer support groups, this attitude that breast cancer gets a disproportionate amount of cancer funding is pervasive and the OP is not alone, lots of patients suffering from other cancers spend plenty of time railing against the breast cancer fundraising efforts.
In addition to what has been discussed (much of which is true) there there are a few other factors.
Success breeds success. The discovery of the role of estrogen and estrogen receptors in some breast cancers has been one of the only recent “breakthroughs” in the research of adult solid tumor cancers. This breakthrough opened the door to many promising avenues of research which drew attention and funding.
Despite all the money spent in researching cancer, true successes are few and far between. Chemotherapy was a miracle cure for many children’s cancers but the success of these treatments did not carry over to adult cancers. There have been great advances in the treatment of some lymphomas and leukemias as well as testicular germ cell cancer. Aside from that, there have not been many advances in cancer treatment in the past 10 years or so. Most research today consists of getting exisiting chemo treatments approved for different cancers…ie testing an approved lung cancer chemo on colon cancer patients…and trying existing chemo treatments in new combinations in the hope of increasing the median survival time by a few weeks.
After watching clinincal trials such as these for many years I am doubting their usefulness. They do make lots of money for the drug companies by creating new markets for their chemo products when they find that the chemo that adds two weeks to the average survival time of a lung cancer patient also works on colon cancer patients. They also provide a ray of hope, however false, to some terminal cancer patients who are heartened to see a long list of approved treatments regardless of their effectiveness. However, it is doubtful that chemo will ever lead to a cure unless some other massive obstacles to understanding cancer are overcome first.
The fact that the breast cancer people have made some real progress is part of what attracts funding…although I have heard patients with non-estrogen responsive breast cancer ( which has a prognosis that has not been improved by all the research) complain about the amount of funding going into estrogen responsive cancers.
Myself, I am getting discouraged and I’m starting to think that watching modern medicine try to “cure cancer” is like watching a 15th century scientist trying to design a jet airplane…there may be some small successes along the lines of papaer airplanes but no matter how much money is poured into the effort it isn’t happening yet because the general level of technology just isn’t where it needs to be to solve the problem. This makes me think twice about giving my charitable dollars to cancer research.
I strongly agree that lung cancer patients are unfairly stigmatized. People need to feel in control of their destinies and this has expressed itself in the new portrayal of certain cancers as lifestyle diseases.
Although there is unrefutable evidence that smoking severly increases your risk for cancer, there is less evidence that quitting reduces the risk. We have certainly not seen a reduction in lung cancer that is on par with the reduction in the number of smokers. I believe according to soemthing I read last year that former smokers now get lung cancer more frequently that smokers.
Yet lung cancer prevention and the entire lung cancer message has been reduced to two words " Don’t smoke". Chest X-rays used to be routine for lung cancer screenings and they are not anymore. However, thousands of non-smokers get lung cancer each year and I can guarantee that the first question anyone asks is “did you smoke?”. I can think of of other disease where everyone’s first reaction at the diagnosis is to blame the patient and sadly, those who believe the patient is to blame are just trying to falsely reassure themselves that they are immune.
sure it would have been much larger etc etc but re-read where it says “breast cancer survivors and their families”. This was a personal response to a personal problem, not a generic ‘for the public good’ effort.
I"m in favor of benefits/fundraising for any/all cancers, illnesses, medical research in general. Have at it.
I disagree. To me, a “personal response to a personal problem” would entail advocacy/fundraising/activism on behalf of one particular individual. Which does happen once in a while.
Have you ever done a Komen walk? Because its a terribly personal thing for most of the people there. And most people there are there on behalf of one (or several) individuals. The money they raise isn’t earmarked for them, but you can’t earmark money like that in a charity anyway - not if you are going to get tax benefits from it.
There is also a capacity issue. The Komen Race/Walk for the Cure in the Twin Cities is so large that they couldn’t piggyback on other women’s cancers (and it gets bigger every year) - much less all cancers.
Did the OP ever mention his wife smoked or are you falling into the trap of believing that lung cancer is a self inflicted disease?
From the OP:
So it appears that his wife smokes/smoked. I’d hardly call lung cancer “self inflicted” but smoking is implicated in lung, head & neck cancers. Also emphysema & COPD. And it contributes to cardiac problems. Yes, a few people who get lung cancer never smoked; many smokers never get lung cancer. But the statistics tell the story.
However, as I pointed out, all of this is now irrelevant to the OP’s wife’s disease. It’s sad that she feels the need to “blame” anybody. And that she sees women–including those with breast cancer–as her enemies. (Although the misogyny may be the OP’s.) Perhaps she & her husband should concentrate on her care right now. If they have energy & time to spare–can’t they find a volunteer group that will support them? And that they can support in turn?
As a soccer referee, my grandfather got yearly medicals courtesy of the referees’ association. When he was 83, one day he was in enormous pain (by the time Gramps complains, others would be twitching in agony on the floor); he couldn’t even stand up. Grandma called an ambulance, they were taken to the hospital, where he had major surgery to take out his enlarged, tumorous prostate; the docs said if he’d gone in sooner it would have been ambulatory surgery (no hospital stay). Instead, he spent almost two weeks in the hospital. Since he was already there, the docs ran every test they could think of.
One of the doctors thought of asking the ref’s association’s doctors for gramps’ reports: turns out the enlarged prostate had been first detected thirteen years before! Grandma’s language was, ah, extremely colorful. He replied that the body part involved was his (therefore I can not take care of it if I don’t wanna) and she replied that not anymore since they got married: it’s common property now.
That attitude of “bah, I can walk therefore I’m fine” isn’t exclusive to men, but it’s more common; it certainly isn’t hygienic.
My father (a lifelong smoker) had lung cancer: it had initially been semi-misdiagnosed as a common variety linked to smoking, but apparently it was a different one that’s linked to “nasty dust in lungs” situations (coal miners, asbestos). Turns out that lung cancer means “a cancer that’s in the lungs,” but there’s still varieties.
This is a large point. To extend it, many doctors tended to brush off women’s health complaints as psychosomatic; how many women died of treatable ovarian cancer because their male doctors blew it off as “female trouble”? Same for breast cancer. A contemporary of my grandmother’s died young of breast cancer because her doctor wrote off her complaints. Now, of course, mammography and Pap smears are common and I would imagine that any doctor who didn’t order these during a routine physical would find himself facing malpractice charges.
Yes, breast cancer is personal, probably because a lot of women survive it, but often at the expense of a body part that is central to gender identity. If that’s gender politics, then so be it, but I’ve known women who have had mastectomies, and they were emotionally devastated afterwards. Even with reconstructive surgery, whatever you get aren’t “yours”, and you feel less than feminine.
In terms of AIDS, no one gave a damn as long as it was confined to the gay population. ACT-UP’s in-your-face campaigns forced middle America to acknowledge its existence, but it wasn’t until it entered the heterosexual population that the disease was taken seriously enough to do actual research to find effective treatments for it. When people like Ryan White and Kimberly Bergalis, who contracted the virus through no fault of their own, became the face of AIDS, the perception shifted from AIDS being a disease that gays somehow deserved because of their sinful, hedonistic behavior to an automatic death sentence that spared no one, not even straight people and children. I am well aware of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, but I’m limiting my points to the United States.
Robin
First- thank you accidentalyuppie - you put into words what I was struggling to say.
(bolding mine). Who are you to say that how this woman is handling her grief and her stress is “sad”. And this “perhaps she & her husband should concentrate on her care right now” - give me a break. This is just one vent from this woman and her husband. I’ll bet ya dollars to donuts they are focusing plenty on her care. I’ll stop now before this gets to a pitting.
Questioning this person about their cancer, whether she smoked, should be no part of the equation.
No I have not.
Let’s suppose that’s true . . . so what? The same thing could be said about a hypothetical effort with respect to cancer in general.
An update:
Recently, I heard on the radio about the Revlon walk to fight women’s cancers
It seems to me this supports my position that it’s all about identity politics and political correctness.
It seems to me that it’s mostly about Revlon knowing who their customer base is.
A guy at my health club died from breast cancer. he was in his mid 30s.
Then why doesn’t Amheiser-Busch sponsor a walk for men’s cancers? (Or maybe they do? If they have, it certainly hasn’t gotten much attention.)
Out of curiosity, what is “men’s Cancer” BPH? Testicular? Any others?
I don’t know. Have you asked them?
Maybe they have other corporate sponsorships. Maybe their research has shown that their demographic responds better to, say, scholarship efforts and big shiny horses. Maybe it just hasn’t occurred to them yet and they’re waiting to hear from people like yourself that it’s important to you.
I was listening to the radio months and months ago and someone was talking about why women’s hands and feet get colder than men’s. Blah blah bla de blah. But the interesting part went something like this:
“So, people didn’t evolve to do this, except for women and people from Africa.”
We-ell, kind of a big exception, isn’t it?
Or I go to the cardiologist with my husband and sit reading the posters that describe heart attack symptoms. Waaaay down in the bottom right hand corner, it notes that women have different symptoms of heart attack. They didn’t list them.