“1 in 8” – Fear Mongering and the Probability of Developing Breast Cancer
Every year, over 700 thousand women in the United States are diagnosed with some type of cancer. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women and is the second leading cause of cancer...
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Pink Kitsch, Brought To You By NBCAM
During National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM), and throughout the year, pink ribbons and products abound in supermarkets, shopping malls, magazines, newspapers, television shows, billboards,...
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“It’s Time To Get Real”
The commercialization of breast cancer has been a growing trend. Beginning with the emergence of the pink ribbon in 1992, there has been an increasing notion that breast cancer “awareness” results from...
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Mammogram Mania
Image from www.breastcancersite.com You wouldn’t know it from the pink billboards but questions about the benefits and risks of screening mammography have been ongoing in the medical scientific...
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A Call for Responsible Reporting
Andrea Mitchell MSNBC On September 7th, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell told viewers that on a “personal note” she was “now among the one in eight women in this country…who have had breast cancer.” In her...
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3. Factoids and Impressions
One might assume that anything involving breast cancer awareness would be based on the best available evidence. Unfortunately, this assumption would be wrong. I’ve evaluated hundreds of campaigns,...
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The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®
Journalist Christie Aschwanden has written one of the finest essays I’ve read about the “false narrative” (i.e., the fairytale notion that breast cancer is a uniformly progressive disease that starts...
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The trouble with Komen: Misusing statistics/Generating false hope
This article was edited since its original publication. It is now widely known that the benefits of wholesale mammography screening were overpromised. Rates of overdiagnosis (i.e., when a diagnosed...
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The false narratives of pink ribbon month, redux
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning freelance writer and editor. She is a contributing editor for Runner’s World and was a contributing editor for Health from 2000 to 2010. She has been a...
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Komen, Still Spreading Screening Hype
I was taken aback a moment ago when I came across a Facebook update from yesterday posted by a Komen Affiliate. It was advertising free mammograms. There is nothing wrong with offering free mammograms...
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