Why it shouldn’t take a tragic star to shake women out of apathy
Seven women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and two die from it every single day.
All the more shocking is the fact that if all eligible women attended screening, more than 80 per cent of deaths from cervical cancer would be prevented.
screening rates are at their lowest level for 20 years, and that means hundreds of women are suffering gruelling treatment and/or dying needlessly.
the situation is so grave that Public Health england and the nHs this week launched the first ever tv campaign to encourage every woman who’s been invited to attend for a smear test, or has missed an appointment, to book now.
I hope it works, but I wonder, too, how it is that women have become so apathetic and complacent about their health; so blasé about screening as to miss appointments that could help stop a deadly disease in its tracks.
Because it’s not just cervical screening. More women than ever before are also missing breast screening appointments.
Just 70 per cent of those invited by the nHs in england to have a mammogram do so. some 750,000 women each year don’t bother at all — which is a record low.
Almost as alarming is the fact that, as the Mail reported recently, one in six women say they never examine their own breasts for lumps.
scientific advances have transformed our understanding of disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a range of women’s health problems, yet fewer women than ever are taking advantage of them.
various reasons have been put forward: that women are too ashamed of their bodies because they fear they fall short of the celebrity images they see on social media; or they’re frightened of the discomfort involved; or are worried about seeing a male doctor.
As far as I am concerned, these are just lame excuses.
I worry that women’s medicine is a victim of its own success. too many now assume that whatever the problem, there will be a pill to pop or an operation available to cure them. How misguided! What we need is another blast of the ‘Jade Goody effect’. When the reality tv star was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2008, the resulting publicity saw the numbers of young women attending for smears increase by 20 per cent.
BETWEEN
2008-2009, more than 400,000 women came forward for screening. For women between the ages of 25 and 29, more than 30,000 extra screening appointments were made in the last five months before Jade died in March 2009, aged 27.
And this increase was maintained for several years after her death.
now, I’m not, for one moment, wishing a terminal diagnosis on another celebrity as a means of getting across a public health message. However, there are means of exploiting popular culture to achieve the same impact — not least through tv soap storylines.
When talking to young doctors, I often tell them that if someone really wants to improve the health of the nation, then they should become a script writer rather than a doctor.
soaps have a huge role to play in educating people and stimulating debate about disease, mental health and social issues.
Despite all the public health campaigns, the largest ever peak in requests for HIv testing came in January 1991 when the eastenders character Mark Fowler was diagnosed HIv positive.
It was a similar story when the Queen vic’s landlady, Peggy Mitchell, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996.
I was running a dementia clinic at the time that a storyline on Alzheimer’s involving Mike Baldwin from Coronation street was developing. nearly every patient I saw spoke to me about it.
At the root of this is the fact that humans respond to emotions, rather than facts. We are far more likely to take note of something, act or change our behaviour if it is humanised in some way.
It’s all too easy to dismiss them, but soaps are part of the national conversation for millions of us — and they can save lives.