Cancer awareness turns bad

This week i-ve been on i-player. There's a piece on Women’s Hour about cancer awareness campaigns.  Women’s Hour on 9 February 2012 (chapter two) featured a piece on breast cancer campaigning and what men’s health campaigners could learn from it. Inevitably, the prostate cancer lobby, as personified by the CEO of The Prostate Cancer Charity, was the pupil.

Anyone tootling round my posts knows, or will shortly find out, that I think cancer charities’ styling of cancer awareness is bonkers.

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. (BCAM) Deep sigh. This is the annual high point of my cancer awareness scepticism, stimulated by breast cancer charities and their crappy business model that muddles awareness for health, with their brand recognition and market share. See legions of my previous posts….

British breast cancer charities are all, as far as I can tell, in favour of breast screening. This will be for two reasons. One is that they are genuinely totally convinced of the value of it and that the benefits for all woman far outweigh any risks. The second reason is more intangible – screening’s usefulness as a ‘Call to Action’ and its symbolic strength as a sign of engagement with breast cancer awareness.

Yesterday (Thursday 1 September) I read this piece on the Channel 4 news website. It's about a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine which apparently says says the risks of breast cancer over diagnosis are ‘not made clear’. Ears pricked up.

Yesterday, the BBC news website presented a bowel cancer awareness story, originated by Cancer Research UK, entitled ‘Bowel cancer awareness stubbornly low’. Their tone was a tad patronising - the BBC’s, not CR-UK’s – using the phrase ‘stubbornly low’. ‘Stubborn’ as in ‘asses’, I suppose. Ah yes! The stupid British public.

And here's more - on the CR-UK poll on fear and cancer mentioned in the similarly title post just below, numbered 1.

This time CR-UK's Poll missed out the options for us British to be frightened of terrorism, car accidents, murder and plane crashes - alternatives used previously in these ‘Top of the Shocks’ polls. Instead, they stuck a possibly random selection of cancers into the mix - breast, bowel, lung, prostate, malignant melanoma, cervical, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal, leukaemia, brain, and testicular.

CR-UK has released some non-riot news into August – some polling yet again, on  the unfortunate British and their ‘fear of cancer’. I’ve been here twice before, just like CR-UK, in a couple of posts from 2010.  

Now I’ve tried to open a debate  - with myself, I realise, but an occasional blogger can dream - I’m setting off into boggy ground. Whilst being positive about the expertise of experts in my immediately previous post, I do know doctors and scientists can get it wrong. We still need to work on avoiding the automatic deferential respect of their expert position.

Overrated? Dangerous?  Sometimes, yes. Advocacy by people and patients with a personal connection to a health issue is not an unequivocal good. The public interest is not always well served by involving patients/sufferers in health lobbying.

Here’s a random Prostate Cancer Awareness Month fact.