A post in yesterday’s Well column, about coverage of breast cancer by the media, focused on the first-person narrative of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Journalist Tara Parker-Pope writes:
Her announcement has generated much discussion in the blogosphere, including an analysis by Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, who writes that Ms. Mitchell made some missteps in discussing her cancer.
The Times column goes on to consider what was said, and how it might have been said better, and I agree with much of it. But mainly it’s a meta discussion, journalists talking about how other journalists consider breast cancer facts, figures and narratives.
Buried deep is this number, that according to the NCI, one in 69, or for the sake of simplicity – approximately 1 in 70 — women in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of BC in her forties. That is an astonishingly enormous proportion of women under 50 years affected by a devastating disease.
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It’s an enormous number, and physicians following the USPSTF recommendations against screening women in their forties are doing their patients and their families a huge disservice.
Stacey, My thoughts exactly — That horrendous bottom line, based on SEER data assembled by the NCI, gets overlooked in all the discussion about how to convey facts, women’s choices and controversy about screening.