Wednesday, June 07, 2006

relief

For years, doctors and nurses and college nurses and everybody have been telling me: you must do breast self-exams. Ok. I think I have done this maybe once in my lifetime, while maintaining a background level of guilt because of my family history of breast cancer.

So imagine my delight when I read this today:
It is acceptable for women to choose not to do BSE or to do BSE occasionally.
Did you catch that? The American Cancer Society says it's ok not to do breast self-exams! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Apparently the value of the exams has been undermined by such things as, oh, a lack of evidence that they work. Boy does that make me happy. Goodbye, guilt! Now if only they'd decide there's nothing to this flossing thing....

8 comments:

grrrbear said...

Well of course. Besides, isn't that really the job of boyfriends/husbands anyway? Why else would a woman have one?

MonkeyMom said...

To lift heavy things and unscrew pickle jars?

grrrbear said...

Fair point, fair point...

I guess we're like swiss army knives, huh?

J.Po said...

Dude. My PCP sent the same message to me last year during my annual. She said research is showing there's no difference between women who do and women who don't.

Cheryl said...

I think there is no difference because no one actually does it, but some women lie and say they do.

Annie said...

I've been hearing about the "no difference" thing, too, but on the other hand, I"ve also heard/met anecdotal cases of women who identified lumps and swear their lives were saved because of it. It's a strange combination of things to hear.

towwas said...

That's a pretty common combination of things to hear, actually. I think the key is "and swear their lives were saved because of it." Nobody knows that. For example, their next mammogram might have found the same lump.

Stacey Pelika said...

Hooray! I can cross one source of occasional self-criticism off my list!