Regarding breast cancer and male-dominated medicine

[Horse with no Name]

:rant:
I have written about the loss of my best friend to this disease awhile back. It is brutal. It doesn't care how good of a person you are.
I have just read about Angelina Jolie's mother succumbing to the disease, as well as Molly Ivin's current struggle.
I just cannot understand why it is not cured?
Breast cancer has been "out there" for a long time.
However, when prostate cancer started increasing...it seems that there was a blood test developed to detect it in almost no time at all.
Medication and surgery were right behind.
Now it is one of the most treatable cancers because the detection is merely an extremely accurate blood test instead of a very uncomfortable and not always accurate radiologic procedure. The insurance companies don't hassle the docs about that as much as they hassle them about mammograms in women under 40.
Is this simply because men run the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries?
This chick thinks so.


:rant:

[Bjornsdotter]

1. So does this one

....and I've been ranting about it for about 30 years.

Cheers

[jpgray]

2. Is there any evidence to support that?

A few differences between a breast and a prostate.

[deadmessengers]

3. Contrarian view

I would like to point out that breast cancer research receives over double the funding of prostate cancer research. Also, a man over 60 is twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than a woman of the same age is to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

Both are serious diseases, and both deserve the full attention of the medical community. But to say that the absence of a simple blood test to indicate the possible presence of breast cancer is the resuly of a male conspiracy seems a little bit tinfoil-hattish to me.

[MonkeyFunk]

4. Prostate cancers

are quite often very slow-growing. Breast cancers are often quite different.

You'd have to show some statistics regarding the rates of such cancers vs. the research funding for these cancers before you can demonstrate a bias, intended or not.

As I recall, by their 70s, upwards of 80% of all men develop prostate cancer. I don't think breast cancer incidences are nearly that high.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

5. I disagree.

Breast cancer is also much more treatable than it used to be -- I can recall when a diagnosis of breast cancer meant radical mastectomy, no questions asked. Now, there have been developments in chemo and radiation therapy, as well as more subtle surgical techniques, so breasts can be saved.

All kinds of cancer have been possible for as longs as there have been humans. Breast cancer has been "out there," as you said, since Betty Ford went public in the 1970s, but women had breast cancer long before that. Similarly, men had prostate cancer long before it became a matter of public discourse in the late 1980s. In each case, medical advances were being made all the time, but not necessarily in the public eye.

It is also possible (and I am no expert and will gratefully accept correction on this point) that an antigen test for breast cancer has not been developed because one is not possible given the type of cancer. For example, I am not aware that antigen tests are available for lung, esophageal, bone, or other cancers; not for lack of trying, but because medical knowledge has not progressed far enough.

[sendero]

6. Same reason..

... prostate cancer hasn't? And the treatments for it are even more brutal than for breast cancer.

My ex wife and my mother have contracted breast cancer about 3 years ago. Both are doing fine now.

"They" cannot cure pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, and numerous others.

[Berry Cool]

15. "They" cannot cure breast cancer, either.

When people who had it are doing well, they're merely in remission. Recurrence is, sadly, possible at any point from then on in their lifetimes, although with some forms of the cancer it may be less likely. Breast cancer is not considered "cured" until and unless the person who had it dies from something else.

[sendero]

18. Generally...

... all cancers are considered "cured" if they remain in remission for a period of 5 years. It is possible that some cancers that "come back" do so becuase they were never totally gone, and that others are simply new occurences, that the conditions that spawned the first one are still there.

[mondo joe]

7. Breast and prostate cancer are not comparable in that way.

Not in proportion of the population affected, nor in ease of diagnosis.

[donco6]

9. True, not comparable.

Not that there might not be a bias toward men in medicine, but this isn't a good example.

[dsc]

8. Lung cancer is way more common in men

and has seen virtually no advancement in treatment options.

[DavidDvorkin]

10. The PSA test for prostate cancer was discovered by accident

It was a serendipitous discovery during a study of something else.

[madrchsod]

11. yes but it is getting better

centuries of treating women as property or unclean has left a stain on medicine that will take years to erase.

[Lady President]

12. Cervical cancer is a better example

If you want to see me get my rant on, just bring up the topic of cervical cancer. It's been deemed the "bad girl" cancer. Despite the fact that there is a vaccine that could greatly lower the rate of cervical cancer, insurance companies don't want to cover it, doctors don't tell patients about it, and parents are made to feel bad asking for it. I'm certain that if men contracted penis cancer from HPV at the same rate that women contract cervical cancer, the vaccine would be given to every junior high student in the country.

To mirror your post, I just read that women with dense breast tissue are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. Not just that it is harder to detect, but genetically more likely to get cancer. I wonder if insurance companies will allow these women to have low cost ultrasounds and MRIs because traditional mammograms won't detect tumors. (I fall into this category and plan to bring it up at my next appointment.)

[TheWraith]

13. I'm sorry you feel that way, but it's not exactly accurate.

For starters, prostate cancer hasn't been cured, and it still kills a lot of people--despite being slow growing compared to breast cancer. There is no cure for cancer, at least not yet. But you point out yourself the obvious answer: one is detectable by means of a simple and accurate blood test, the other requires a difficult, expensive, and unreliable proceedure. Do you think that it's this way because somebody chose to make it that way, or simply because that's the difference between two diseases?

Furthermore, the portrayal of breast cancer as a "womens' disease" or somehow under-researched is largely the result of what can only be described as a PR offensive by various organizations. Heart disease kills three times the number of women that breast cancer does, but it doesn't receive nearly the same attention or public awareness. At the same time, breast cancer research is among the best funded cancer research of any kind in the world.

[RB TexLa]

14. Our (male) rate of breast cancer is on the rise

http://www.breastcancer.org/male_bc_rise.html

[Bridget Burke]

16. There are a fair number of female doctors.

Women work in all parts of the health industry. Sure, men are generally more powerful--but that's the case all over.

The government just announced that funding for the NCI is being cut. Again. "Men" are not the problem. Funding for other diseases is not the problem.

Got any figures?

[WiseButAngrySara]

17. There's not been found a specific and reliable marker for

breast cancer and treatment and prognosis are complicated by estogen positive and negative tumors. The cure and treatment of breast cancer has dramatically improved over the recent years; it is now not a literal 'death sentence.' PSA for protate cancer is not without limitations. Most elderly men will have elevated PSA levels because almost all men who reach old age have some degree of BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia), and BPH and inflammation can also falsely elevate PSA levels... it's not a perfect marker by any means.