Health, education and cultural roadblocks
Add comment July 16th, 2006
Students unaware of breast risks
[source: BBC News]
My first reaction to reading an article like this is a simplistic one: educate people about health risks. Try to get a significantly higher percentage of females (and males, since they are affected by the health of family, friends and clients) aware that Age, menstrual cycles, homone therapy, alcohol, obesity and, to a lesser degree, family history and The Pill are all factors leading to greater risk of breast cancer. However, there’s much more to it.
That education bar is apparently pretty low, by the way. According the a recent study of 10,000 female students from 23 countries, conducted by Cancer Research UK, fewer than 5% knew that about alcohol, exercise or being overweight. Students were more likely to rate stress as significant, even without strong scientific evidence to back that correlation. So, we don’t know about the stuff with academic support and know about stuff that may not matter to this disease.
What students were best at was connecting cancer with genetics. Of course, there isn’t anything you can do about it. You can’t change your lifestyle to make yourself less related to high-risk family members, but you can make personal choices that counteract the effects of many of these other factors. In fact, this report suggests a few: Breastfeeding; Having several children, at a young age; Staying in shape; Healthy eating; and Don’t smoke.
Education puts women in a position to make better-informed choices, and so it is an important part of any health campaign. But it doesn’t force compliance or reduce other obstacles to making those decisions. American culture, in particular, is near phobic about breastfeeding. Efforts at education, such as the National WIC Breastfeeding Promotion Project, have helped increase breastfeeding rates overall. However, the lower socio-economic mothers are not behind that surge. There are other factors keeping breastfeeding from being more widely accepted, such as the Americans placing a priority on independence, separation of career from family, and the power of the infant formula lobby.
I don’t want the society in which I live to be in a position of mandating lifestyle decisions or penalizing circumstance, so the “force” option isn’t at all an appealing companion to “education.” However, there are clearly many other areas where, as a culture, we can become aware of our own influences on decision making and work to address those.