Cancer awareness should be all about the audience - the UNaffected public.
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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.
This explains the emotive tone often adopted for cancer awareness messaging and the unreasonable amount of detail, with no comparative or relative context in which to cast it.
Anyone with cancer deserves to have their experiences taken seriously but when every cancer charity facilitates their involvement in awareness raising with one cancer to focus on – something a member of as yet unaffected members of the public absolutely should not be doing - the messages are far too detailled and far too numerous.
No wonder the as yet unaffected public are muddled and unsure about cancer.
In case you are still unconvinced why this is important, it's because basic, accurate cancer awareness promotes two things: risk reduction that lowers the incidence of cancer and symptom recognition and response that helps detect cancer early -to increase the chance, for some, of extending survival.
So we really should get cancer awareness right. Point it in the right direction: towards the as yet cancer free public.
