Is anyone still unaware of breast cancer?
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, although you probably don’t need another reminder of the fact.
If you’re among the 20 million or so Americans who watched NFL football this past Sunday, you saw the pink shoes, gloves, pompoms, goalpost pads and too many other accoutrements to account for.
If you’ve viewed TV news, listened to radio or checked your social media news feeds today, you’ve already begun encountering the reminders, factoids and updates.
And wherever you go when you go out this month, you’ll run into pink ribbons. They’re everywhere out there.
At Health Imaging and RadiologyBusiness.com, we’re somewhat ahead of all this. For us, it seems, every month is a breast cancer awareness month.
There are reasons for this.
For starters, much of our news coverage is driven by clinical studies. And many of the most-discussed (and most disputed) clinical studies , along with the professional opinions they spur, involve breast cancer.
And then there’s that one hard, cold truth: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. This year it will slay more than 40,000 mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts.
Over the years my own clan has had several brushes with the disease. Fortunately, it didn’t take anyone away from us. Still, en route to creating new bearers of the title “cancer survivor,” it upset many. The scariest moment came when an aunt, my mother’s sister, required a double mastectomy.
I am happy to report that she went on to outlive her nasty molecular assailant by something like a quarter of a century.
Would that all affected women and their loved ones could be so lucky.
Which brings me to an item that, along with football, pinged my radar over the weekend.
When you finish reading this month’s imagingBiz NewsWire, you may want to spend a few minutes with Time magazine’s Oct. 12 cover story. Its headline tips you off to its provocative gist: “Breast cancer’s new frontier: ‘What if I decide to just do nothing?’”
I strongly recommend the piece and its accompanying video. Especially in the very unlikely event that you only take in one mainstream-press piece about breast cancer in this month that is rightly—if a bit overexuberantly—dedicated to awareness of it.
-Dave Pearson
Senior Writer
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.