Disheartening news, ladies. Apparently a study has concluded that breast self-exams haven’t really been that effective in lowering breast cancer death rates. That sucks.
Important Note
This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.
Comments
3 responses to “Breast cancer”
After reading the article, Kris, I beg to differ from your conclusions. Teaching women how to conduct BSE’s hasn’t made a difference (in that study). The study did not talk about how many of these women actually conducted the exams nor how they conducted the exam (you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make it drink). The anecdotal evidence alone, regardless of statistics, has sold me on the importance of self-exams.
Sorry to get all preachy, but public health and data analysis are issues pretty close to my heart (breast exams, get it? breasts are close to hearts… I’m here all week, folks..) 🙂
Oh, I agree. I’d like to see a study done in the U.S. I’m not sure if you can extrapolate from the Chinese results. But still, given that the sample size was over 250,000 and that it sounds like they gave them pretty rigorous instruction (and reminders), I was really surprised and sad to see that it didn’t make that much difference in the results.
i hate to say it, but that makes me feel a little bit better for being such a slacker.