Take the Fright Out of Breast Cancer™

The articles posted identify psychosocial factors and yes, some of them aim to directly assess fear - in a qualitative yes/no survey style - since measurement scales for fear are complex.

The bottom line remains fear, by itself, is not the root cause (even in delaying diagnosis) and in that sense oversimplistic and dismissive of those for whom the fear is intense and absolutely justified.

The discussion does it take courage to conquer fear is for another site, another time...

I am done as I have said my peace.

I am grateful for this community. 😉🌷

It seems like the collective is always trying to find a correlation on behavior. It is always blaming the victim, whether it is eating french fries, having a high bmi or drinking alcohol. It is like you think people can control whether they get breast cancer or not. If there is anything to explain it is it doesn't matter who you are, how you live your life or how you eat, breast cancer can strike. Many people no matter how diligent they are can be diagnosed at any stage of breast cancer. This catching it early is just a way to try to alleviate fears. In my case, mammograms are almost useless yet I still get one once a year. Kind of a one size fits all.

Unless you have been through this you can't understand.

I should add most people with early breast cancer have no signs of the disease. I find it hard to believe there is a sizable group of people with breast cancer ignoring symptoms. Spend the money on better treatments or a cure.

Is it me, but I thought the numbers were rather small in the cited links. Plus there were other factors involved.

Wow, Mods, did you think I would not follow those links? You've certainly dug yourself a deeper hole.

The studies of Chinese women and African-American women in San Francisco actually found what I mentioned earlier: less delay with higher levels of fear.

The first UK study and the Iranian study don't support your thesis, and I'm not sure how it makes sense they were included. The second UK study and the Japanese study list fear as one of many factors, but it is nowhere identified as the most important one. In the Turkish study, 40% of women did delay seeking care, but although the statistical description in the abstract is odd (I cannot link to the full article - that's not exactly a major journal) , fear is once again not listed as the most important factor.

Finally, why in the world would you include a link to something about fear of recurrence? These are women who know what they're up against, and if you decide you need to "Take the Fright Out" of their experience, then you are once again - as we have all been saying - belittling their emotional responses. That paper is not even really a "study" so much as an evaluation of the use of an instrument to detect distress. Detecting distress is fine. Helping people deal with distress is fine. Implying anyone can or should "take the fright out" is frankly demeaning and offensive.

Any of you following this thread, I encourage you to click on those links, especially the ones to the studies of the Chinese women and the African-American women in San Francisco.

I was taken aback by the list of articles posted by the Mods in "defense" of their concept, too! I clicked on a couple...not impressed as valid reasons for this campaign.

I realize that this is an international forum, and that bc is not restricted by borders. I do know that there are members from Japan, and Turkey and some of the other countries of "reference"...but those numbers are extremely low compared to the populations who will be most impacted by the "trivializing" of bc campaigns such as this one. I believe the overwhelming majority of people who reach out to bco as a source of support and info are not, and likely never will be, from the countries where the bulk of those "studies" were done.

The stated purpose of this entire, (and still offensive) campaign is to raise funds for the website. So how is trying to justify their theme using cultural biases in countries where the population likely doesn't access bco very much, supposed to be valid?

Sorry Mods...not buying it. "If it looks like poop, and smells like poop...it's poop".

trveltext --i suspect that like with a lot of non profits, I suspect that a chunk of the 5 million dollars will go towards salaries of people employed by BCO. It doesn't take five million dollars to update a website like BCO! This isn't a site like uber with multiple moving parts. It's an insult to our intelligence in this daY and age of technology that the campaign states that this money is for the website . Mods, lets have transparency regarding what this money is being ear marked for . How much of this money is budgeted for salaries etc ?

so we have a bunch of studies that told us pretty much what we already knew - people are scared to go to the dr and hear that they have or may have cancer. Wonder how much money went to fund all these studies for information we already had. This is not new news! A campaign to 'take the fright out of breast cancer' will not change this.

There are people who are proactive and prefer to catch things early when unusual symptoms of any type show up and then there are those that will avoid going to the dr at all costs because they are fearful of hearing the c word. You can educate people on all the symptoms til you're blue in the face and it still won't make a difference for the ones who prefer to stick their heads in the sand. It's just the way it is.

I was talking with a guy I work with who lost his wife to metastatic melanoma in his 40's, his mom to breast cancer and his mother in law to pancreatic cancer. I relayed to him the 'take the fright out' campaign and the reasons behind it. His response? If you're not scared shitless by a cancer diagnosis of any kind there is something wrong with you. There is almost nothing scarier - for both the one diagnosed as well as their loved ones. If someone takes the time to participate in this 'take the fright out' campaign and their newfound education on BC doesn't scare them to death they need to do more research on it. Slash, burn & poison are the treatment options and none of them come with a guarantee. UNTIL THERE IS A DEFINITIVE CURE THAT ISN'T WORS THAN THE DISEASE, THE FRIGHT WILL ALWAYS BE THERE! This is my 4th go round with the C word and I agree with his assessment 100%.

Um, blue?

Good one.

Just to chime in with another reason someone might delay going to the doctor: Fear of the expense involved with treatment.

About the same time I was diagnosed, my older sister was working with a woman who was also diagnosed. This woman had been homeless for a long while and was currently working a minimum-wage job after just getting back on her feet, so though she knew she had a lump she didn't go to the doctor for a long time. She said she knew she couldn't afford any tests or treatment. By the time she finally went in it was very bad stage IV and she died a few months later.

A long and thoughtful article on this frightful shemozle here:

https://theunderbelly.org/2017/10/a-most-frightful...

Great word, shemozle, I'll add it to my vocabulary!

Thanks Traveltext. Hope the Mods and the Event Team see your post and read the article.