Health promotion

Here’s an interesting thing. I’m trying to find the origins of a story that was all over the news earlier this week. You may have caught it? The one about using MRI scans and some new computer software to improve diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

Sometimes you just know when you have made someone's heart sink. When I sent my letter off to my local breast screening unit, asking for a bit more detail on what use breast screening may or may not be to me, I knew they'd roll their eyes and say either out loud or in their heads 'Oh knickers, it's one of those women.'

Still sent the letter tho'. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Dr.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I've just had my first letter inviting me to attend my local West London breast screening unit for a mammogram. Very oddly, the word 'cancer' does not appear anywhere on it. 

Is this:-

In the west, women know, for the most part, that they are more than just tits and gynaecology. There are still excursions into the 1970’s courtesy of the brittle muscularity of, say, Sky sports presenters or macho City bankers, plus countless minor infractions every day - ‘I was only having laugh, luv’ - but the underlying principle is slowly becoming mainstream. Women are more than just boobs and hormones.

And if they think it, would they ever spell it out it? I suspect not. How would they know when to stop? I’m not sure they would be at ease implying some cancers are not worth being aware of, and I’m sure they wouldn’t name them explicitly.

Recent news has re-ignited fevered debate about for the ideal length of time babies should be exclusively breast fed. Current advice recommends (it’s advice, not a rule) that six months is an ideal time. The news covered research that came up with a new suggestion.

…..except that I doubt NAEDI and the Department of Health think they are ‘versus’ the cancer charities. And as you will find out, I think there should be a bit of ‘v’ in there.

After chatting to various people about SCAM (Sceptics’ Cancer Awareness Month) I'm starting to think it may be rather a complex idea. This may be because it is, or it could be because I make it sound complicated, by gabbling away about it with too much arm waving and an excess of sentences beginning with ‘….and another thing….’.

If ‘cancer awareness’ for health promotion was to start suddenly now, invented as the result of a bright idea from a public health specialist, I’m not sure we’d settle on our current method of informing the public about cancer as the best we could come up with. I’m not even sure that what we have even counts as a ‘method’.

The audience for cancer awareness should be the cancer-free general public but cancer charity driven campaigns are actually directed at the user/sufferer/survivor (chose your preferred epithet). Leave awareness to cancer charities and it’s suddenly all about them and their stakeholders – the donors and people with that cancer. They are the constituency that cancer charities know best and to whom they want to show support.