What’s in a word such as prevention; a lot when used in TV news clips, print media articles and websites. Prevention, loosely defined, says something can be stopped from happening altogether. Really?
You can reduce your risks of getting breast cancer, but you cannot prevent it entirely because there are some risk factors you can do little to nothing about such as growing older and genetics. Also, breast cancer is not one disease; it is many, with different causative agents besides the known risk factors contributing to getting breast cancer such as: poor diet, lack of exercise, alcohol consumption, etc.
So, as recent articles I’ve read claim, if only women would embrace and live a healthy life style by maintaining a normal weight, exercising, eating a low fat diet, not drinking more than one drink a day, etc they could prevent their breast cancer. If only it were that simple. Does it mean that if I develop breast cancer I gave it to myself for not practicing prevention activities? Now there’s a guilt trip! Isn’t it bad enough getting breast cancer without being made to feel you gave it to yourself? Now we are crossing over into the blame game that lung cancer patients face when diagnosed, when the first question people ask is, “Did you smoke?” For nonsmokers, always have to defend how they got lung cancer, is an added burden to coping with their disease.
If a prevention lifestyle was all there was to saving yourself from breast cancer, many more of us would be here today then are here. Young children wouldn’t be motherless, and many of us would not be living with metastatic breast cancer or living with the fear of a recurrence.
I would never have started this blog, or worked for the American Cancer Society, as a navigator, because I lived a prevention life style, and had no known genetic mutations. I did have a risk factor, I got my first cancer in the age category that most women are diagnosed…55-64 years. The only way I could have prevented this, to my knowledge, was not to have aged…not a viable alternative.
Until prevention is a reality for all forms of breast cancer, let’s take the word prevention out of articles and off the TV.
Let’s encourage women and men, to follow a life style that can reduce the risk factors for breast cancer. Let’s take away the implied responsibility that if only you took better care of yourself, you would never have gotten breast cancer.
