Breast cancer awareness

The organization that runs the official BCAM aims to promote mammography and other forms of early detection as the most effective means of fighting breast cancer.

Through mass-participation events, breast cancer survivors form a single, united group that speaks and acts consistently and shares a coherent set of beliefs.

[25] Some of these items are everyday products that have been repackaged or repositioned to take advantage of cause-related marketing, such as teddy bears, clothing, jewelry, candles, and coffee mugs.

[31] Responding to criticism, Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker said that corporate promotions enabled the organization to reach new audiences and that "America is built on consumerism.

[34] Designed by the mint's director of engraving, Cosme Saffioti (reverse), and Susanna Blunt (obverse), this colored coin is the second in history to be put into regular circulation.

[35] Business marketing campaigns, particularly sales promotions for products that increase pollution or have been linked to the development of breast cancer, such as alcohol, high-fat foods, some pesticides, or the parabens and phthalates used by most cosmetic companies, have been condemned as pinkwashing (a portmanteau of pink ribbon and whitewash).

[36] Such promotions generally result in a token donation to a breast cancer-related charity by taking advantage of the consumers' fear of cancer and grief for people who have died to drive sales.

[37] Critics say that these promotions, which net more than US$30 million each year just for fundraising powerhouse Susan G. Komen for the Cure, do little more than support the marketing machines that produce them.

Non-profit organizations often benefit from public service announcements, which are free advertisements provided by newspapers, radio and television stations, and other media.

The term describes an "idealized" patient who combines assertiveness, optimism, femininity and sexuality, despite the effects of treatment, and as a "paragon [who] uses a diagnosis of breast cancer as a catalyst for a personal transformation".

[47] Sociologist Gayle Sulik analyzed the she-ro's social role and ascribes it qualities that include being an educated medical consumer with a brave, pleasant and optimistic public appearance and demeanor, who aggressively fights breast cancer through compliance with screening guidelines and "disciplined practice of 'breast health'".

[51] Also included in the role is a form of the have-it-all superwoman, cultivating a normal appearance and activity level and minimizing the disruption that breast cancer causes to people around her.

[53] The success of their efforts to look and act normally may paradoxically increase their dissatisfaction, as their apparent ability to handle it all discourages people from offering help.

[55] Women who reject the she-ro model may find themselves socially isolated by the breast cancer support groups that are nominally supposed to help them.

[58] Similarly, the culture is also ill-equipped to deal with the news that a previously hyped treatment or screening procedure has been determined to be ineffective, with women advocating for the acceptance and promotion of inexpedient activities and inefficient or even sometimes harmful drugs.

[62] Breast cancer thereby becomes a rite of passage rather than a disease,[63] with pink ribbon culture honoring the suffering of its she-roes by selecting them based on the amount of misery they have experienced,[64] and leading women whose treatment is less painful or debilitating to feel excluded and devalued.

[68] Appearing unattractive—such as going out in public with a bare, bald head if treatment causes temporary hair loss—transgresses the approved, upper-class style of pink femininity and provokes shaming comments from strangers.

Some women have avant garde aesthetic tastes: "One decorates her scalp with temporary tattoos of peace signs, panthers, and frogs; another expresses herself with a shocking purple wig; a third reports that unadorned baldness makes her feel 'sensual, powerful, able to recreate myself with every new day'".

[79] Women in the late 1980s and 1990s followed the successful approach used by ACT-UP and other AIDS awareness groups, of staging media-friendly protests to increase political pressure.

Prominent women who made the "wrong" choice were publicly excoriated, as when Nancy Reagan chose mastectomy over lumpectomy followed by six weeks of radiation therapy.

[82] Barbara Ehrenreich writes that, before the feminist movement "medicine was a solid patriarchy", and women with breast cancer were often treated as passive, dependent objects, incapable of making appropriate choices, whose role was to accept whatever treatment was decreed by the physicians and surgeons, who held all of the power.

[86] Breast cancer has been known to educated women and caregivers throughout history, but modesty and horror at the consequences of a largely untreatable disease made it a taboo subject.

The next year, journalist Rose Kushner published her book, Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report, which she had written while recovering from a modified radical mastectomy.

[90] The media reported these women's health and their treatment choices, and even invited some to appear on talk shows to discuss breast cancer frankly.

[91] The breast cancer movement has resulted in widespread acceptance of second opinions, the development of less invasive surgical procedures, the spread of support groups, and other advances in patient care.

This effectively increases the market size for breast cancer organizations, medical establishments, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the makers of mammography equipment.

[106] Women who resist screening mammography or breast self-exams are subjected to social pressure, scare tactics, guilt, and threats from some physicians to terminate the relationship with the patient.

Otis Brawley, a top official for the American Cancer Society, says that "even if we overdiagnose 1 in 5, we have numerous studies showing that by treating all these women, we save a bunch of lives".

[114] For example, Ford Motor Company ran a "Warriors in Pink" promotion on their Ford Mustang sports car, which critics say was intended to sell cars and counter the bad publicity the company received by reducing its workforce by tens of thousands of people, causing many of them to lose their health insurance, rather than to prevent or cure breast cancer.

[129] The non-genetic factors with consistent evidence increasing breast cancer risk include "ionizing radiation, combination estrogen–progestin hormone therapy, and greater postmenopausal weight. ...