What do female staff of breast cancer charities do about their own breast screening?

Someone (e.g. the media) clearly wants a confident response with a clear solution, so your breast cancer charity [insert preferred name] confidently responds, with a clear solution.

 

Breast screening fits perfectly. And it’s a very clear message. According to a media response I found recently on Breakthrough Breast Cancer’s site ‘We urge all eligible women to attend their screening appointments’.

 

Urge? Pithy, but unnerving.[see Breast screening: an unCharitable view]

 

Evidence is everything in health and life. The public understanding of its importance is greatly helped by discussion, rather than direction. Women should be making informed decisions on everything, not doing as they are told. That’s anachronistic behaviour for a breast cancer charity to model for women.

 

When a woman is diagnosed, breast cancer charities are surely keen on each of those women seeking out and understanding all the pros and cons of any treatment options? I’d hope there is a similar rigour encouraged in discussion of screening but it’s not clear to me that there is.

 

I’m not against breast screening but I am against anything that obscures the power and importance of making informed choices. It is the responsibility for everyone in the field – the screening programme, the charities and the media to provide the correct information, or campaign for provision of it, or to hold health policymakers to account for their actions in supplying it. The unintended consequence of ‘urging’ women to screen is that they are manipulated towards it. The aim should be to make available the most complete information to each women so they can decide whether to go, or not. If the doubts about breast screening are wrong deconstruct, don’t contradict, the argument.

 

As a ponderer on breast screening I keep coming across women with breast cancer in my personal debate. Why are they wheeled out by the media and charities to ‘help’ me? They aren’t objective bearers of information. That would help. I don’t want to ask a breast cancer charity about screening. I haven’t got a cancer query. I’ve got a screening query.

 

I wonder how informed choice on screening works amongst female employees of breast cancer charities? I doubt there is a corporate line forcing breast screening on staff. That would be sinister. But can an individual woman employed by a breast cancer charity decide screening is not for them? Do they admit that, if they do? It’s a private matter, of course, but how often do the personal and professional butt up against each other in this issue? Or does the socialising into the groupthink of the work environment remove any such dissonance? It may not be an issue for staff of course. Breast cancer charities may not have many female employees over fifty since ‘over fifty’ suggests a senior role and there will be fewer of those. And maybe staff over fifty have breast cancer or relatives with it so think differently from the way I do, about it.

 

But what effect on a screening decision may working in a breast cancer environment have on female staff who do not have breast cancer but who meet such women all the time and are deeply empathetic? Do they downrate their need for information and the making of an informed choice in favour of falling in with a directing policy message from their employer repeated to all women in the UK?

 

Now I’m wondering if all mammogram radiographers or breast cancer nurses also go promptly for their breast screening appointments…..