If anything can be said for breast self-exams, it’s that they inspire some crazy fun videos. But the latest news suggests that, for most of us, that may be all they deliver. If this sounds as crazy to you as it did to me, read on.
Last weekend I attended a two and a half day ProjectLEAD workshop organized by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). While my family was arduously touring Washington’s apple country and subjecting themselves to gallons of cider, I was basking in a series of (how to put this?) content-dense lectures on the molecular biology, epidemiology, and politics of breast cancer. (And worshiping the coffee urn…)
Strangely enough, it was the NBCC’s breast self-exam “myth buster” that gave me a mental hernia. They recently launched a series of BC myth busters, the first of which unveiled this graphic smack-down of those ubiquitous “examine your breasts” shower cards that crop up like mold spores in locker rooms across the country.
Breast self-exams: myth busted!
The headline, “Breast Self-Exam Does Not Save Lives”, not only struck me as counter-intuitive, it made me angry. I found my own cancer without the help of my mammogram (which stupidly insisted it wasn’t there), and have met too many women with the same story. Self exams sure seem to have saved our lives, so far. And without them we’re left with mammograms, and their false negative rates exceeding 40 percent for us pre-menopausal types. Abandon BSEs? The whole concept freaked me out so badly nothing else would sink in. I had a problem.
Diagnosis: BSE Insecurity Syndrome
Rx: Get a clue…
So what’s the NBCC’s Myth Buster getting at?
For starters, the majority of women who find their own cancers do so in the course of informal self contact — in the shower, during sex, or when adjusting that push-up bra just so. It’s a rare woman who conducts disciplined, by-the-book monthly BSEs, though who among us has not felt anxiety and guilt over skipping them? So, step one to relieving BSE Insecurity Syndrome is understanding the difference between everyday self-awareness and structured BSEs. Women do a lot more of the former, despite all the self-exam paraphernalia.
Second, and here’s a crucial point behind NBCC’s “Get Out of the Shower” card: serious time, effort, and money is spent promoting self-exams: on advertising, on teaching women to do them, on studying whether we do them, on designing and distributing those cards, pamphlets, flyers, and videos on how to do them. The breast self-exam industry has brought us everything from funky training boobs to weirdly ironic items like this self-exam-themed feel-better card for breast cancer patients.
With screening tools like this, you need a rabbit's foot
In a world of infinite resources, that may or may not be a bad thing. But in a world of hard realities, the NBCC is rightly concerned that money spent on promoting BSEs, despite a complete lack of evidence that they save lives, is money stolen from programs that do (such as guaranteeing quality health care for all women). This is very much a resource allocation issue.
Where does this leave us?
The real point of getting “Out of the Shower” is to know, and then let your friends, family, and elected representatives know, that BSEs are a lame screening tool for a common and too-often fatal cancer, a Band-Aid for a hemorrhage. BSEs sure as hell won’t prevent cancer, haven’t appreciably altered the number of women who die of the disease, and won’t spare you surgery or chemotherapy or radiation.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t examine your girls. In fact, NBCC points out that about 80 percent of cancers not detected by mammography are detected through self-awareness. But it’s time to stop distracting ourselves with chirpy pink marketing and get back to the business of finding a cure.
We need a screening tool that detects cancer before it happens, and treatments that prevent cancer before it can develop. We should be lobbying for these, and ensuring are donations are being spent on these, every single chance we get. After twenty years of BSEs and mammograms in the spotlight all we have to show for it is a marketing binge, a minor flinch downward in breast cancer mortality, and a lot of shower gewgaws.
Additional Resources:
NBCC’s Myth buster series: read it, get angry, and stop helping these myths spread! Burn your BSE card and demand more funding for risk, prevention, and screening research, and for equal access to treatment regardless of income.
To BSE or not to BSE? The NBCC white paper on the benefits and risks. Yes, risks.
The New York Times’ Tara Parker-Pope explains how crude screening tools affect more than just breast cancer.
A National Cancer Institute (NCI) dry-as-dust but information-packed review of existing breast cancer screening methods.
An NCI fact sheet on mammograms, explaining in detail the limits of their effectiveness. How much of this has your doctor shared with you?
An Epic Flip-Flop on Breast Self-Exams?
If anything can be said for breast self-exams, it’s that they inspire some crazy fun videos. But the latest news suggests that, for most of us, that may be all they deliver. If this sounds as crazy to you as it did to me, read on.
Last weekend I attended a two and a half day ProjectLEAD workshop organized by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). While my family was arduously touring Washington’s apple country and subjecting themselves to gallons of cider, I was basking in a series of (how to put this?) content-dense lectures on the molecular biology, epidemiology, and politics of breast cancer. (And worshiping the coffee urn…)
Strangely enough, it was the NBCC’s breast self-exam “myth buster” that gave me a mental hernia. They recently launched a series of BC myth busters, the first of which unveiled this graphic smack-down of those ubiquitous “examine your breasts” shower cards that crop up like mold spores in locker rooms across the country.
Breast self-exams: myth busted!
The headline, “Breast Self-Exam Does Not Save Lives”, not only struck me as counter-intuitive, it made me angry. I found my own cancer without the help of my mammogram (which stupidly insisted it wasn’t there), and have met too many women with the same story. Self exams sure seem to have saved our lives, so far. And without them we’re left with mammograms, and their false negative rates exceeding 40 percent for us pre-menopausal types. Abandon BSEs? The whole concept freaked me out so badly nothing else would sink in. I had a problem.
Diagnosis: BSE Insecurity Syndrome
Rx: Get a clue…
So what’s the NBCC’s Myth Buster getting at?
For starters, the majority of women who find their own cancers do so in the course of informal self contact — in the shower, during sex, or when adjusting that push-up bra just so. It’s a rare woman who conducts disciplined, by-the-book monthly BSEs, though who among us has not felt anxiety and guilt over skipping them? So, step one to relieving BSE Insecurity Syndrome is understanding the difference between everyday self-awareness and structured BSEs. Women do a lot more of the former, despite all the self-exam paraphernalia.
Second, and here’s a crucial point behind NBCC’s “Get Out of the Shower” card: serious time, effort, and money is spent promoting self-exams: on advertising, on teaching women to do them, on studying whether we do them, on designing and distributing those cards, pamphlets, flyers, and videos on how to do them. The breast self-exam industry has brought us everything from funky training boobs to weirdly ironic items like this self-exam-themed feel-better card for breast cancer patients.
With screening tools like this, you need a rabbit's foot
In a world of infinite resources, that may or may not be a bad thing. But in a world of hard realities, the NBCC is rightly concerned that money spent on promoting BSEs, despite a complete lack of evidence that they save lives, is money stolen from programs that do (such as guaranteeing quality health care for all women). This is very much a resource allocation issue.
Where does this leave us?
The real point of getting “Out of the Shower” is to know, and then let your friends, family, and elected representatives know, that BSEs are a lame screening tool for a common and too-often fatal cancer, a Band-Aid for a hemorrhage. BSEs sure as hell won’t prevent cancer, haven’t appreciably altered the number of women who die of the disease, and won’t spare you surgery or chemotherapy or radiation.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t examine your girls. In fact, NBCC points out that about 80 percent of cancers not detected by mammography are detected through self-awareness. But it’s time to stop distracting ourselves with chirpy pink marketing and get back to the business of finding a cure.
We need a screening tool that detects cancer before it happens, and treatments that prevent cancer before it can develop. We should be lobbying for these, and ensuring are donations are being spent on these, every single chance we get. After twenty years of BSEs and mammograms in the spotlight all we have to show for it is a marketing binge, a minor flinch downward in breast cancer mortality, and a lot of shower gewgaws.
Additional Resources:
NBCC’s Myth buster series: read it, get angry, and stop helping these myths spread! Burn your BSE card and demand more funding for risk, prevention, and screening research, and for equal access to treatment regardless of income.
To BSE or not to BSE? The NBCC white paper on the benefits and risks. Yes, risks.
The New York Times’ Tara Parker-Pope explains how crude screening tools affect more than just breast cancer.
A National Cancer Institute (NCI) dry-as-dust but information-packed review of existing breast cancer screening methods.
An NCI fact sheet on mammograms, explaining in detail the limits of their effectiveness. How much of this has your doctor shared with you?
US Breast Cancer rate as of 2005…