great column on prostate cancer awareness

Stumbled across this on Verizon news site. Love the title too.

Quentin Johnson - Gland Equity

I may be totally wrong about this, but it seems like men care more
about women's breasts than women care about men's prostates.

Let's go back about a year ago, when I happened to stumble on a
professional lacrosse All-Star game on TV. The players were all
wearing pink helmets (if you know anything at all about lacrosse you
now know that the players were men). I soon learned that the game was
a fundraising event for the fight against breast cancer.

Wow, I thought to myself, what a wonderful, magnanimous, sensitive
thing for a bunch of male athletes to do.

Then, last Mothers' Day weekend, Major League Baseball took its turn
at the plate, with players swinging pink bats to promote breast cancer
awareness. Another great idea, and a fantastic tribute to Moms
everywhere.

But wait a second. Men get sick too, don't they? Prostate cancer
killed an estimated 27,000 men in the U.S. last year. That figure
falls about 30 percent short of all the people, men and women, who
died of breast cancer, but let's not quibble over the numbers. Why
aren't NBA players, for example, bouncing baby-blue basketballs to
draw attention to a disease that most men will inevitably get if they
live long enough? Breast cancer awareness efforts are light years
ahead of those for prostate cancer, and there has to be a reason why.

Granted, men aren't as organized as women when it comes to drawing
attention to their peculiar afflictions. Pass the hat during a sports
event and most guys will drop in some change. But the idea of men
marching in the streets or sponsoring big standalone events to battle
prostate cancer seems kind of odd. We read in the news about famous
men having prostate surgery, but there are no distaff Betty Rollinses
or Linda Ellerbees to drive home the point. The best our team can
muster is largely-forgotten '80s junk-bond king Michael Milken. One
man throwing his own personal fortune at the problem is admirable, but
it isn't enough.

There's also a misconception out there that men simply don't care.
Case in point - that TV ad where a woman says "some things, men don't
like to talk about," to which her male partner chimes in like a
ventriloquist's dummy, "Yeah, like prostate health." Heck, I could
blurt out a 20-year history of my prostate - PSA test results, digital
exam horror stories, and why I think green tea and exercise may have
shrunk my slightly-enlarged prostate, if anybody ever bothered to ask
me. It's OK for women to confide in each other about lumps, bumps and
Pap smears. But men? Forget about it.

Furthermore, a lot of men, myself included, believed that if we just
ate enough ketchup and tomato sauce all our prostate problems would be
over. New research discounting the benefits of the red food pigment
lycopene sent us all back to the drawing board.

Just last week, I finally, FINALLY saw something that gave me hope
that men's diseases are considered important, too. At a supermarket
not far from where I work, at the end of each checkout line, sits one
of those big blue water jugs to collect donations for prostate cancer
research. None of the bottles held enough coinage to even cover their
bottoms, but hey, it's a start.

I now gladly pop a dollar bill in the jug every time I go. But here's
something that took the wind out of my sails - a cashier asked a woman
if she'd like to make a donation. "No," she replied, pointing to her
male companion, "if HE wants to he can do it with HIS money."

Maybe if men's prostates were more conspicuously located, prostate
cancer awareness would be sexier.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Delayed Treatments for Prostate Cancer
    ... "Incidence of Initial Local Therapy Among Men With Lower-Risk Prostate ... Cancer in the United States "? ... It was a retrospective review of thousands of patients in the SEER database. ... Treatment may result in morbidity. ...
    (talk.politics.medicine)
  • Re: Medical Research-Evidence
    ... "Radical Prostatectomy versus Watchful Waiting in Early Prostate ... The only issue is whether a treatment works. ... differences in cancer survival rates over very long periods of time may be ... advantage for surgery vs. watchful waiting. ...
    (talk.politics.medicine)
  • Flaxseed Stunts The Growth Of Prostate Tumors
    ... Flaxseed Stunts The Growth Of Prostate Tumors ... prostate tumor growth, according to a study led by Duke University Medical ... surgery for the treatment of prostate cancer. ...
    (sci.med.nutrition)
  • Re: Medical Research-Evidence
    ... "Radical Prostatectomy versus Watchful Waiting in Early Prostate ... The risk of death was not seen at 6 years, ... differences must be evaluated carefully even if statistically significant. ... prostate cancer. ...
    (talk.politics.medicine)
  • Re: Medical Research-Evidence
    ... "Radical Prostatectomy versus Watchful Waiting in Early Prostate ... mortality, overall mortality, and the risks of metastasis and local ... that in the face of diagnosed prostate cancer, ... crippling symptoms of metastatic disease beyond cure is of major importance. ...
    (talk.politics.medicine)