5 ms·

I'm puzzled at how breast cancer could be a political issue. How so?

kaesar14 5y ago
Americans have a weird relationship with breasts. Also issues that only affect women (mostly, I know men can get it in rare cases?)
- ars 5y ago
  Breast cancer is the cancer that raises the most money (that pink ribbon you see everywhere). That money goes somewhere..... This is not a "weird relationship" thing, rather women got organized and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness
  - ben_w 5y ago
    While all that is true, America absolutely has a weird relationship with breasts.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      > While all that is true, America absolutely has a weird relationship with breasts. It’s more broad than that, it’s the relationship with women’s health as a whole.
    - gweinberg 5y ago
      That depends on what you think a normal relationship with breasts would look like, I suppose.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        In particular, the pearl-clutching gender-specific moralising: it is absurd that an organ whose specific purpose is to feed infants by being inserted into their faces is censored specially from minors, whereas the non-functional copy of the organ in men which can’t even do that is apparently acceptable (modulo dress code, weather, etc, but you can walk around or swim or sunbathe topples as man, not as a woman).
    - darkhorse13 5y ago
      What is exactly a "normal" relationship with breasts for a country to have?
      - teekert 5y ago
        Things like: It's normal to breast feed in public. Or the nation does not go bananas when a nipple is exposed on TV. Or how normal it is to sunbathe topless. Arguably this also relates to how normal it is for kids to walk around naked and families to be naked around each other. If you're really interested, watch some older Dutch movies to see the normalness of naked, like Turkish Delight [0]. Or even have a closer look at the relation between the Professor and Raquel in the recent Casa the Papel. It's different from US series. More respectful, mature wrt women if you ask me. More emphasis on intelligence. Or on a beautiful woman in her 40s with normal wrinkles. The US, like on many other topics, seems to be polarized, caught between the hyper sexuality of Cardi B and the prude nature of American culture in general. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film)
    - teekert 5y ago
      I'd say it's only the nipple. The contrast in response to side boob and nipple seems to be off the chart in the US.
    - yholio 5y ago
      > While all that is true, THE WORLD absolutely has a weird relationship with FEMALE BODIES. Fixed that for you.
  - thomasjudge 5y ago
    Also the largest and best known breast cancer fundraising organization, Susan G Komen, has, in the words of wikipedia, "been mired by controversy over pinkwashing, allocation of research funding, and CEO pay." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure
cwmma 5y ago
male doctors have not historically treated female patients great.
- ars 5y ago
  That's not really true in this case. There was no effective treatment for a long time, until suddenly there was. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    We're not even talking about treatment: just regular screening and detection, the same as you get when you go to your doctor and he sticks a finger up your butt and tells you to cough.
    - mrguyorama 5y ago
      >sticks a finger up your butt and tells you to cough You may want to consider finding a different medical professional!
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Not at the same time! Referring to the two common tests that doctors routinely perform on men, every physical checkup
    - CyberDildonics 5y ago
      Whoever did that to you was not a medical doctor
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Not at the same time! Referring to the two common tests that doctors routine perform on men, every physical checkup
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I don’t think “political” is meant to mean “controversial” here. There were just some extremely successful awareness campaigns for it in the 80s and 90s (to the point where it’s the stereotypical example of an awareness campaign for many of us), so people care a lot about it.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  One thing that will cause mammograms to be political, in several countries, is that there's a difference in perception of the downsides vs upsides of such screening programmes, and we're bad at communicating the trade to a population who lack the statistical literacy to understand it intuitively. So our best shot from a public health perspective is to say "Here's what we recommend for everybody" and pay for that. All screening programmes have two difficulties, which must be balanced against the benefit, and this trade is somewhat personal, so when the balance is quite fine the arguments can be vociferous as a result. 1. The screening itself may seem unpleasant. One woman may find it a very mild annoyance, a drive ten minutes out of her way, the staff are very pleasant, the scan itself is far less traumatic than a bra fitting, and she receives easy to understand results after not very long and isn't anxious about them; but for another maybe it's an hour's bus journey to the city hospital, the staff there are short-tempered and say she has the wrong paperwork, then another hour in a queue, she feels like she's just meat, squashed around for the convenience of the machine for what seems like forever, and then after anxiously waiting for what seems to be too long the results are confusing to her and she has to have a friend interpret them. 2. Over-treatment is always a problem. Screening by definition detects something that isn't causing noticeable symptoms. If you have a noticeable lump, or mysterious bleeding, you don't need screening you need a doctor's appointment. So a positive screening result might be nothing important. However either you've now got the burden of a diagnosis you ignored or, you accept the medical advice and are treated, even though it's possible (not likely, but possible) that you would have been just fine without treatment. So, screening programmes are set up based on guessing how to trade these factors plus a third, how much should we spend on this medical intervention? After all, in some sense every dollar doing breast cancer screening is a dollar you don't have to cure blindness in poor orphans (or of course, to bomb somewhere) If your experience of a screening programme is that it's a minor inconvenience at most, and yet you know people who died of undetected disease, more screening seems like a no brainer. Particularly if you live somewhere where screening stops at age 50, and somebody you know died of undetected disease aged 54, you might reason that the screening should go to age 55 or 60 to detect such cases, no matter the public cost. On the other hand if your experience is that it's an awful ordeal even when negative, and you know people who spent their last years horribly scarred by surgery as a result of suspected disease but then they died in their sleep from something else anyway, you may feel that there's already too much screening and it should be trimmed back, not to save money but the extra money for other programmes is welcome.
cratermoon 5y ago
There's a lot of literature about the systematic biases in medicine that exclude a lot of women's health care from serious consideration.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's definitely not brest cancer now. It's very well funded now.
randcraw 5y ago
Breast cancer isn't political. But there's continuing debate in the US medical establishment over the proper way to screen for it -- how to test, how frequently, at what age range, what constitutes a positive result, and how should the doctor follow up if the test is positive? The recommended answers to these questions seem to change every few years, and the substantiation behind the answers is often inconsistent. The same issues bedevil prostate cancer screening.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
317070 5y ago
While Ronald Reagan was in office, he had a colectomy for a colon tumor in 1985 (turned out it was not cancer) [0], and his wife had a mastectomy for breast cancer in 1987 [1]: While Reagan did a lot to try to defund cancer research regardless, the first lady's mastectomy drew a lot of attention to a previously taboo topic. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/16/us/reagan-s-illness-medical-outlook-cancer-of-the-colon-a-leading-killer.html https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/16/us/reagan-s-illness-medic... [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15261-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15261-...
dekhn 5y ago
It kills large numbers of middle-to-rich people who are highly motivated and make advocacy groups that are effective lobbyists. Back when I was a life scientist the best advice I got was to work on diseases the family members of congresspeople had.
himinlomax 5y ago
The science is pretty well established on *generalized* breast cancer screening not improving health outcomes despite being costly. (In short: cancer is rare, tests have false positives that trigger biopsies, biopsies are invasive and can be harmful, overall biopsies and pointless surgery on slow growth cancers do as much harm as cancer.) But since screening has been framed as caring for women, pointing out the flaws with screening is automatically seen as hating women.

Americans have a weird relationship with breasts. Also issues that only affect women (mostly, I know men can get it in rare cases?)

ars 5y ago
Breast cancer is the cancer that raises the most money (that pink ribbon you see everywhere). That money goes somewhere..... This is not a "weird relationship" thing, rather women got organized and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness
- ben_w 5y ago
  While all that is true, America absolutely has a weird relationship with breasts.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    > While all that is true, America absolutely has a weird relationship with breasts. It’s more broad than that, it’s the relationship with women’s health as a whole.
  - gweinberg 5y ago
    That depends on what you think a normal relationship with breasts would look like, I suppose.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      In particular, the pearl-clutching gender-specific moralising: it is absurd that an organ whose specific purpose is to feed infants by being inserted into their faces is censored specially from minors, whereas the non-functional copy of the organ in men which can’t even do that is apparently acceptable (modulo dress code, weather, etc, but you can walk around or swim or sunbathe topples as man, not as a woman).
  - darkhorse13 5y ago
    What is exactly a "normal" relationship with breasts for a country to have?
    - teekert 5y ago
      Things like: It's normal to breast feed in public. Or the nation does not go bananas when a nipple is exposed on TV. Or how normal it is to sunbathe topless. Arguably this also relates to how normal it is for kids to walk around naked and families to be naked around each other. If you're really interested, watch some older Dutch movies to see the normalness of naked, like Turkish Delight [0]. Or even have a closer look at the relation between the Professor and Raquel in the recent Casa the Papel. It's different from US series. More respectful, mature wrt women if you ask me. More emphasis on intelligence. Or on a beautiful woman in her 40s with normal wrinkles. The US, like on many other topics, seems to be polarized, caught between the hyper sexuality of Cardi B and the prude nature of American culture in general. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film)
  - teekert 5y ago
    I'd say it's only the nipple. The contrast in response to side boob and nipple seems to be off the chart in the US.
  - yholio 5y ago
    > While all that is true, THE WORLD absolutely has a weird relationship with FEMALE BODIES. Fixed that for you.
- thomasjudge 5y ago
  Also the largest and best known breast cancer fundraising organization, Susan G Komen, has, in the words of wikipedia, "been mired by controversy over pinkwashing, allocation of research funding, and CEO pay." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure

cwmma 5y ago

male doctors have not historically treated female patients great.

ars 5y ago
That's not really true in this case. There was no effective treatment for a long time, until suddenly there was. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
- cratermoon 5y ago
  We're not even talking about treatment: just regular screening and detection, the same as you get when you go to your doctor and he sticks a finger up your butt and tells you to cough.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    >sticks a finger up your butt and tells you to cough You may want to consider finding a different medical professional!
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Not at the same time! Referring to the two common tests that doctors routinely perform on men, every physical checkup
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    Whoever did that to you was not a medical doctor
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Not at the same time! Referring to the two common tests that doctors routine perform on men, every physical checkup

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I don’t think “political” is meant to mean “controversial” here. There were just some extremely successful awareness campaigns for it in the 80s and 90s (to the point where it’s the stereotypical example of an awareness campaign for many of us), so people care a lot about it.

tialaramex 5y ago
One thing that will cause mammograms to be political, in several countries, is that there's a difference in perception of the downsides vs upsides of such screening programmes, and we're bad at communicating the trade to a population who lack the statistical literacy to understand it intuitively. So our best shot from a public health perspective is to say "Here's what we recommend for everybody" and pay for that. All screening programmes have two difficulties, which must be balanced against the benefit, and this trade is somewhat personal, so when the balance is quite fine the arguments can be vociferous as a result. 1. The screening itself may seem unpleasant. One woman may find it a very mild annoyance, a drive ten minutes out of her way, the staff are very pleasant, the scan itself is far less traumatic than a bra fitting, and she receives easy to understand results after not very long and isn't anxious about them; but for another maybe it's an hour's bus journey to the city hospital, the staff there are short-tempered and say she has the wrong paperwork, then another hour in a queue, she feels like she's just meat, squashed around for the convenience of the machine for what seems like forever, and then after anxiously waiting for what seems to be too long the results are confusing to her and she has to have a friend interpret them. 2. Over-treatment is always a problem. Screening by definition detects something that isn't causing noticeable symptoms. If you have a noticeable lump, or mysterious bleeding, you don't need screening you need a doctor's appointment. So a positive screening result might be nothing important. However either you've now got the burden of a diagnosis you ignored or, you accept the medical advice and are treated, even though it's possible (not likely, but possible) that you would have been just fine without treatment. So, screening programmes are set up based on guessing how to trade these factors plus a third, how much should we spend on this medical intervention? After all, in some sense every dollar doing breast cancer screening is a dollar you don't have to cure blindness in poor orphans (or of course, to bomb somewhere) If your experience of a screening programme is that it's a minor inconvenience at most, and yet you know people who died of undetected disease, more screening seems like a no brainer. Particularly if you live somewhere where screening stops at age 50, and somebody you know died of undetected disease aged 54, you might reason that the screening should go to age 55 or 60 to detect such cases, no matter the public cost. On the other hand if your experience is that it's an awful ordeal even when negative, and you know people who spent their last years horribly scarred by surgery as a result of suspected disease but then they died in their sleep from something else anyway, you may feel that there's already too much screening and it should be trimmed back, not to save money but the extra money for other programmes is welcome.

cratermoon 5y ago

There's a lot of literature about the systematic biases in medicine that exclude a lot of women's health care from serious consideration.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
It's definitely not brest cancer now. It's very well funded now.

randcraw 5y ago

Breast cancer isn't political. But there's continuing debate in the US medical establishment over the proper way to screen for it -- how to test, how frequently, at what age range, what constitutes a positive result, and how should the doctor follow up if the test is positive? The recommended answers to these questions seem to change every few years, and the substantiation behind the answers is often inconsistent. The same issues bedevil prostate cancer screening.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

317070 5y ago

While Ronald Reagan was in office, he had a colectomy for a colon tumor in 1985 (turned out it was not cancer) [0], and his wife had a mastectomy for breast cancer in 1987 [1]: While Reagan did a lot to try to defund cancer research regardless, the first lady's mastectomy drew a lot of attention to a previously taboo topic. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/16/us/reagan-s-illness-medical-outlook-cancer-of-the-colon-a-leading-killer.html https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/16/us/reagan-s-illness-medic... [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15261-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15261-...

dekhn 5y ago

It kills large numbers of middle-to-rich people who are highly motivated and make advocacy groups that are effective lobbyists. Back when I was a life scientist the best advice I got was to work on diseases the family members of congresspeople had.

himinlomax 5y ago

The science is pretty well established on *generalized* breast cancer screening not improving health outcomes despite being costly. (In short: cancer is rare, tests have false positives that trigger biopsies, biopsies are invasive and can be harmful, overall biopsies and pointless surgery on slow growth cancers do as much harm as cancer.) But since screening has been framed as caring for women, pointing out the flaws with screening is automatically seen as hating women.