Tag Archives: Cancer Awareness

By defunding Planned Parenthood, Komen Breast Cancer Foundation shows its true colors aren’t pink

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Is the all-things-pink breast cancer impresario bowing to Right-wing anti-abortion pressure in pulling their financial support for low-income breast exams provided by Planned Parenthood? That a nonprofit industry heavyweight like the Komen Foundation would shift its emphasis from helping the poor on quasi-moral grounds is deplorable, but hardly surprising. Their ubiquitous “breast cancer awareness” campaign is all about duplicity and greed. Instead of raising funds for awareness of where cancer comes from, research we could all use, Komen shifts the focus on mitigation. What would you think about a rape “awareness” campaign that emphasized victim convalescence over chasing down the rapists? Looking after the victims while rapes escalate? That’s practically enabling.

Such boobs

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Pink Beast Cancer Awareness Yogi Ball
All that pink was not only for cancer awareness, advocates insisted, it was for breast cancer research. But when research finally yielded a result, which was to recommend fewer mammograms, the whole pink bandwagon wailed in defense of its major sponsor!

That would not you madam, standing there dressed to the hilt all pink, but the mammogram/awareness purveyors.

What exactly can they pretend to want by way of research results? Ending cancer is going to mean eventually someone will no longer profit from it.

Spokesmen are scrambling to distance themselves from the new recommendations. Breast cancer survivors are making appearances to decry that they wouldn’t have survived except for the early detection via mammogram. Still none question why they contracted the cancer in the first place. That’s a chief problem I have with the committee’s announcement. Without alluding to the possibility that mammograms may induce breast cancer, the recommendations only suggest that the regular checkups are unnecessary. This leaves plenty of space for the medical industry –should we call it the breast cancer treatment industry?– to caution falsely against a lost stamina for prevention.

Everybody’s problem, it’s broadcast, is that insurers may decide to cut back on their coverage of mammograms. People who may want them, and especially people whose living is made giving them, are worried. So the Surgeon General has spoken out against the recent findings, assuring all that nothing’s changed and mammograms should proceed apace. The committee was only a committee and its recommendations are not binding.

News to me is that regardless of the official line, it’s still up to the health insurance companies to decide what they want to cover. Thus the Surgeon General’s comforting reassurances were only ceremonial edicts as well.

If the recommendations have done their damage, the insurance adjuster can’t be put back in the bag, then why not turn the bag inside out for the silver lining? The good news is that all these years of pink meditation on the problem of breast cancer has for once yielded a result! Stop the unnecessary mammograms. No one is at liberty to say they cause breast cancer because that would be a malpractice genie that no one can afford. Read it between the lines. Reduce the incidence of breast cancer by following the new recommendations.

Race for the cure, race to the source

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I’m seeing a sea of pink gloves as receivers and defensive backs vie for the long bomb; on the sidelines, pink shoes, pink caps, pink jerseys and pennants; on the players’ helmets, pink ribbon decals next to the other patriotic flair. Have you seen the breast cancer awareness t-shirt which reads “Save the Ta-Tas?” When childbearing-age ta-tas are threatened, maybe American men will do more than commemorate cancer. Then we’ll see pink smokestacks, pink chemical tankers, and pink mammogram machines. This industrial pink-wash is as unfunny as pinkeye.

Raise awareness to the CAUSE of cancer

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Look at all that pink respect for breast cancer! Breast cancer awareness, I mean to say. As Marie has pointed out, women’s basketball over the weekend was draped in custom pink uniforms for the cause of cancer. “Cause” is an unfortunate pun, actually. No one’s interested in raising awareness of the cause of cancer.

I saw some coaches awarding Coach Yow a symbolic check for $10,000, to go “100% to breast cancer research” the announcers were happy to point out: “Not 93%, or even 99%, but 100% to research!” That’s good. If it had gone toward raising awareness [through ad campaigns], that money would be going 100% back to the television network.

About medical research, I have to wonder, if it weren’t for private fund-raising efforts, would there be insufficient research for a cure for cancer? Without Jerry’s Kids, or Walk for a Cure, etc, would it not be in the public’s interest to cure diseases like cancer? Are the 50,000 women diagnosed with cancer each year going unnoticed? Is the Health Department not picking up on the trend?

Whether our medical/industrial system wants to cure cancer is a matter of reasonable doubt. From a management perspective, can our society afford to stop this natural-seeming population trimmer? Breast Cancer preys generally upon women of post-reproductive age. Is our economy terribly concerned about the longevity of a less productive population segment?

Breast Cancer awareness would appear to be more about remembrance, about honoring those women who’ve lost the lottery of industrial toxin exposure. What about awareness of what’s causing cancer? We’ve researched causal-links plenty. Perhaps we should be raising money to go toward awareness of the cancer culprits. Let’s see if the media talking heads will speak so glibly about that!

Aren’t we learning that cancer behaves like rust? Cancer is oxidation, it’s, well, a cancer, in the figurative sense. Cancer is decay. It can be thwarted by proper avoidance of carcinogens, such as cigarette smoke, pollutants, or toxins. We know the sources of carcinogens: industry, chemicals, manufacture of plastics, poisons, toxic foods, etc.

How does wearing pink make any of that more visible? We’ll cure cancer when we arrest the causes. When we, literally, arrest the purveyors.

The Cancer Cartel at work again

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Think pink Nike jerseyI don’t know how many of you are women’s basketball fans, but just in case you missed last weekend’s action, most of the top-ranked college teams played their games bedecked from head to toe in pink uniforms, compliments of Nike. The Think Pink initiative is a global, unified effort of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) to raise breast cancer awareness on the court, across campuses, in communities and beyond. More than 800 universities participated in some capacity in the event which happened to coincide with ESPN’s ‘February Frenzy’ of games. Fans of the game were encouraged to don pink in support of the cause.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen a typical women’s basketball fan, but I can assure you that pink is not her favorite color. However, like the rest of us, she’s always willing to do her part in the fight against breast cancer.

During last week’s action, in addition to the play-by-play reminder of breast cancer, fans were repeatedly encouraged to give generously to the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund. We were told that we must band together to stop this ruthless killer of women. Yes, we surely surely must.

My question is why didn’t Nike just write a big check to the fund and be done with it? We could’ve actually WATCHED the Rutgers-Tennessee game, a rematch of last year’s NCAA final; the fund would have its money; more “research” could be done; big Pharma and their minion-surgeons could have their pin money; big food could keep fucking with the food supply so that these fundraisers will always be necessary. And Nike will be at the ready to supply gear for each of them, swoosh color negotiable.

Even more importantly, more women would be convinced to cough up money for an annual mammogram, more biopsies of benign tissue would be done and, in the process, even more of them would get cancer from the large, very unnatural and unhealthy, doses of radiation they regularly receive. I mean, let’s forget that one of the world’s foremost authorities on radiation, John W. Gofman, (MD, PhD, Professor Emeritus at UC-Berkeley–no hack, this guy), estimates that 75% of breast cancer cases could be prevented by avoiding exposure to the ionizing radiation of mammography and x-rays.

Sounds like a win-win for everyone. Except, of course, the people who are supposedly benefiting by thinking pink. Maybe next year they could really get everyone’s attention, not just basketball fans, by naming the campaign Think Dead. Just a thought.