Posted May 22nd, 2013, in Breast Cancer | No Comments
Yesterday, in the comments section of this blog, I was reprimanded by a reader named Becca, a young woman with breast cancer who has chosen to have her healthy breast removed to reduce her risk of future disease. She took exception to my last post. I wrote a long response to her in the comments section, then realized I’d rather put that response here, where it’s more visible. Here is what Becca wrote: Fear is not the only reason women get bilateral mastectomies. Younger women with breast cancer (like myself, diagnosed at 35) are more likely to have this surgery for a lot of reasons, such as: * we have many more years of life to develop a new primary in the other breast. My surgeon, also at MSKCC, estimated my risk to be 25% or higher. (I’m BRCA negative) * we want a symmetrical chest * we want to [...]
Posted May 20th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 12 Comments
So, still on Angelina here. And why, aside from her marriage to Brad Pitt and her right leg having its own Twitter account, you and I are not like her. This clip from CNN is the best and most responsible summations I’ve seen over the last week. I love it because Dr. Monica Morrow from Memorial Sloan-Kettering is smart, calm and clear. She explains not only what you need to know but what you should ask your own doctor if 1) you’re concerned about a genetic mutation or 2) you are a woman of seemingly average risk diagnosed with breast cancer in one breast and think you should respond by having a double mastectomy “just in case.” The other reason this clip is great is because of the intelligence and sensitivity of the interviewer, Zoraida Sambolin, who is herself dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis (though she doesn’t reveal the nature of her cancer). [...]
Posted May 15th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 8 Comments
Largely because of the cover story I wrote on breast cancer a few weeks back in the New York Times Magazine, I spent yesterday being asked my reaction to Angeline Jolie’s announcement of her preventative double mastectomy. I talked to newspaper reporters, was on TV, on the radio. I wrote a post for the New York Times Magazine blog. But sometimes in this new media era of quick turn-around, we’re compelled to react so fast we don’t have much of a chance to actually think. And twenty-four measly hours later, as the dust has settled a bit, these are the issues I believe are stake: The advisability of removing your breasts and ovaries when you have a rare genetic mutation such as Jolie’s (the BRCA1 mutation affect .6% of the general population; about 1% of Ashkenazi Jews; about 5-10% of women diagnosed with breast cancer). Hers was a totally understandable and medically warranted choice. [...]
Posted May 13th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 31 Comments
I often wonder if the general reader knows about fact-checkers. A fact-checker at a magazine verifies every single fact that a writer includes in an article. Every. Single. One. So, say, when I turned in my recent article, “Our Feel-Good War On Breast Cancer” to The New York Times Magazine I had to provide an annotated copy of the piece along with acceptable documentation for everything I had written. In this case, that included multiple articles from peer reviewed publications such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of Clinical Oncology and the British Medical Journal, statistics from National Cancer Institute and its SEER database, things like that. Statistics quoted in other articles are unacceptable—even other fact-checked publications. If I see an interesting statistic in Time or on Reuters I have to track down the original source or it’s a no-go. Nor could I use a stat from a [...]
Tags: pink-washing
Posted May 10th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 3 Comments
In an earlier post, I wrote about Rose Kushner, wondering why her name and voice had been sidelined in the story of breast cancer activism. If anyone could be considered the heir to Kushner (insomuch as I understand her story), it is my friend and inspiration Barbara Brenner. Barbara put up her final “Healthy Barbs” blog post earlier this week. I will miss her fierceness, passion and uncompromising intelligence. I got to know Barbara as the head of Breast Cancer Action; back then, as I recall, the organization’s motto was, “The Bad Girls of Breast Cancer.” I liked that. It often took me years of conversations to catch up with Barbara’s thinking. She was the one who first talked to me about the over-promise of mammography. She also talked about the lack of centralized data on cancer patients and cancer research. That just sounded wonky to me, ut now I finally [...]
Tags: pink-washing
Posted May 6th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 20 Comments
Update: Ok, I changed the headline to this post because it was distracting people. The new financials for Susan G. Komen for the Cure are out. According to the Dallas News, in 2012, the same year that the organization was roiled by the Planned Parenthood scandal (under Nancy Brinker’s leadership and based largely on her say-so), the same year Brinker was forced to step down as CEO in an attempt by the organization to regain public trust, the same year donations dropped as a result of her miscalculations, Komen also gave Brinker a 64% pay hike–from $417,000 to $684,717. Does that make sense? Just so you know, a Charity Navigator survey found the median salary for the CEO of a not-for-profit organization to be $132,739. Also, since Brinker is no longer the CEO of Komen, what is she doing in her “new role” for that kind of dough? In case you’ve forgotten, the percentage the organization [...]
Tags: pink-washing
Posted May 3rd, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 2 Comments
I just got this press release. Made my jaw drop. Did they not know who they were writing to? I get that Thomas could have missed my blog post about this event. But come on, Dude. You’re in New Jersey. You’re a PR guy. The New York Times is your local paper. So let’s give him some publicity–feel free to email Thomas at the linke below and tell him what you think of “paint your town pink.” I responded by sending both the above links with this note: ”You are REALLY writing to the wrong girl. I think you are wasting people’s time and money without doing anything to help eradicate breast cancer.” From: “Thomas Paolella” <TPaolella@meridianhealth.com> To: “Thomas Paolella” <TPaolella@meridianhealth.com> Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:00:56 PM Subject: FW: Giuliana and Bill Rancic are coming to NJ to discuss the importance of mammography Just a reminder about Saturday’s event. If anyone from your outlet is able [...]
Tags: pink-washing
Posted May 2nd, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 2 Comments
I was tempted to headline this “Komen: What a Bunch of Boobs!” But that seemed in poor taste….. In my piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Mag I wrote that after our interview (interesting timing) Komen finally took off its homepage the misleading stat about the benefits of mammography. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz had called them out originally in their excellent “Not So” series in the British Medical Journal. According to the ever-brilliant Gayle Sulik at Breast Cancer Consortium, however, you can still find the stat displayed elsewhere on Komen’s site. Maybe the PR folks just overlooked this one instance as they hastened to expunge the embarrassing evidence of science denialism from the site. But Sulik notes, As Komen’s bold messaging continues to be erased from its materials if not from collective memory, is it enough for the group to simply step back and quietly disassociate from a misinformed pro-mammogram campaign? Yeah-what she said! [...]
Posted April 28th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 26 Comments
There were a couple of things that got cut from my New York Times Magazine piece on breast cancer that I wish I could’ve squeezed in. One is kind of wonky, which is why it was dropped, but super important. It’s about data collection, based on a discussion I had with Dr. Peter G. Bach at Sloan-Kettering: It surprised me to learn how little cancer data the U.S. collects, though it is vital to improving treatment. We know how many cases of cancer there are and the stage of diagnosis, but unlike Scandinavian countries, we don’t keep track of which therapies are used or what happens to patients over the long-term. I could write a whole piece on publicly accessible, non-proprietary data collection and why we need to do it. But I just wanted to at least put it out there. Breast Cancer Action talks a lot about this one, and they are [...]
Posted April 25th, 2013, in Breast Cancer | 16 Comments
My cover story in the New York Times Magazine is up: it’s called “Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer.” As a journalist I write about all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes I write for fun. Sometimes I write because I have a great story to tell. Sometimes I write to pay the rent. Sometimes I write because if I don’t say something about something I see as wrong I will absolutely explode. This is one of those. And it won’t make you feel so good. That said, I do want to share another story that didn’t belong in that piece, that has not so far belonged in anything I’ve written but that truly is a feel-good cancer anecdote: it’s about how amazing and wonderful and compassionate people can be. The background: In case you don’t know, last July I found a lump in my breast; it turned [...]
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