......as I do today (20 October) here take the chance to expand on the detail of what you mean. Should you ever grump about Breast Cancer Awareness Month in public, for example, you're risking one of those uncomfortable arguments contradicting what people think you said, or believe, whilst they simultaneously refuse to engage with what you actually said or believe.
Breast cancer is nowhere near being a solved problem. Women with secondary cancers, older women with primaries, women with Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS), women unaware of the risks of alcohol intake and overweight in leading to breast cancer need all the good effects of awareness they can get. But 21st century cancer awareness needs considerable remodelling to help these women, more women and other women.
The problem is with the volume knob of breast cancer – it's up too high, so you can't hear anything else, there's one programme with endless repeats and it’s stuck on the Youth Channel.
Everyone, it seems, in the cancer charity sector aspires to emulate the strengths of the breast cancer lobby and the success of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM). Well don’t. Stop assuming BCAM is good for all women. It isn’t. Not if you think people should be offered balanced information about their health.
BCAM has a bad case of 'message creep'. I have no idea what it’s really about as it slides off in three or four directions. It’s health promotion to unaffected women. It’s the chance for women with breast cancer and those close to them, to engage in cancer activism. It’s for fundraising and marketing. It’s PR for any number of individuals and companies happy to link their reputations or products to a popular cause.
Can it be effective in all of them if it engages in a random selection of those, at different times in different media? And which facet of awareness is the most important one? It's not clear.
BCAM fails older women. They are at greatest risk of breast cancer and are often oblivious to this, thinking breast cancer is a younger women’s cancer, due to the charity and society's PR obsession with the 20% of women who are diagnosed under 50.
As fashion targets breast cancer, older women weren’t going to feature, were they? And this is supportable because…. Well, WHY exactly?
The use of sexiness and youth to add value to a women’s health issue is counterproductive, or does the end - income and profile - justify the means? Discuss.
BCAM fails to cast breast cancer as a major health issue for women, which it what it is. It makes it look like the only one. Disingenuous but understandable as it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and not Women’s Health Awareness Month. But the truth is twice as many women die of stroke. More women die of heart attack or lung cancer.
More than a quarter of all cancer survivors alive today in the UK have breast cancer. That prevalence means there's an extensive lobby. Good for improving services for women affected. Not good for women as yet undiagnosed. The huge lobbying capacity is easily interpreted as evidence of a massive problem. Many people know many women with breast cancer, after all. But this mass of women is also a sign of success because those women are surviving. Other woman with other cancers with limited treatment options and an un-sexy or non gender specific cancer would like to marshal more women’s voices to their cause too, but until more women start surviving, for longer, they can’t. And until they do, where’s the space for them to campaign on research, health services, support and information?
Where is the evidence that the advantages in research, health service delivery and health promotion that have accrued for women through lobbying on breast cancer have helped other women with other health issues?
I’d like to think there is some.
BCAM is health promotion as lit by a lighthouse. Intermittent blinding light shines on a particular area of health, casting older women into the pitch darkness beyond, along with all sense of proportion and everything that affects women but isn’t a stereotypic ‘women’s problem’.
Could do better, I think. Look out for, or better still, write something for Sceptics' Cancer Awareness Month in April 2011 for a start.
