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April 1, 2010
ADDING A PINK STONE OF OUR OWN
 Daniel O’Connell, an educated Irish Catholic, was admitted to the bar of Ireland in 1798 and soon became a leader in the cause to restore the Irish Parliament to his people. Forty-five years later, on August 15, 1843, O’Connell spoke to a throng estimated to be more than one million strong, from the top of the Mound of Hostages at Tara, a megalithic hill (and tomb) that dates back to 2500 B.C.
Imagine that you were one of those million who, upon hearing the news that O’Connell was to speak, left your home and fields and walked, on foot, for days to this place in County Meath, near the River Boyne, that was once holy ground for the High Kings of Ireland. You arrive there early in the day and wait for hours, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of your countrymen, for the oratory to begin.
You might have been able to spot the dot that was O’Connell on the hill, hundreds of yards away, but how could you hope to hear a word of what he had to say? Even allowing for a booming Irish voice, such as the late Senator Ted Kennedy possessed, you might as well have been deaf. Except for this, that as the speech begins, the throng of humanity amassed in front of you, begins to repeat O’Connell’s words, from the place on the mound where they are first uttered to ever widening circles of repetition. And then, upon hearing them yourself, you do the same, repeating the words to all behind and around you, so that every one of the million hears his message.
In 2010 we don’t need to walk so far, or strain so hard, to hear what our leaders have to say. Many don’t need to walk an inch; they reach into their pockets and open up their iPhones or Blackberrys. No need for shouting now; no, we have the Internet, with its blogs and face books and twittering sites, to pass the words around, not to millions but to billions. So with this wondrous technology I, an Irishwoman who received her medical degree one hundred and fifty years after O’Connell passed the bar, would like to say to those who care to listen:
CHANGE comes not only from the top down, as happened when Barack Obama led the way to healthcare reform, but it comes, more powerfully, from the bottom up, as was proven when he was elected President. One of my colleagues from the International Masters for Health Leadership at McGill University, Dr. Eric Litvak, put it this way: “If you want to really know what’s going on, look down. More often, go down.” Go down to see what’s going on, and look for opportunities to change the world from the bottom up.
Having looked down at my patients, lying on stretchers, waiting for their surgeries or their treatments, I say, it is no longer enough to settle for “awareness” in the fight against breast cancer. We must also act. It is no longer enough to race for a “cure” for breast cancer - though at least another 1.4 million women around the world this year will be longing for just that. It is no longer enough to “stand up” to cancer - though that is certainly a good way to draw attention to it. No, we must seek out cancer’s breeding ground, smoke it out, and destroy it, before it has a chance to destroy us. I say it is time for prevention – but more than the mere abstraction of prevention, it is time for prevention itself.
Victory over breast cancer will only come when we use our collective common sense to apply what we already know about how to prevent the disease: smoking cessation, avoidance of all synthetic female sex hormones, education about and encouragement of a plant-based diet, warnings about the hazards of alcohol consumption, and implementation of a regular, moderate exercise program - an intervention that is the easiest of all to apply, and that has been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer by 30-40% and reduce the risk of death from breast cancer by as much as 50%.
The primary prevention of breast cancer, the PURE CURE, is the right thing to do for our future. The potential savings, in lives and money, is enormous. Many researchers have said that at least 30% of all breast cancer is preventable, employing known risk reduction strategies. If we can just put that awareness into action, we’d be saving at least $2 billion precious dollars a year. If we want to bend the cost curve in medicine, that’s the way to do it: take the disease off the table entirely and pocket the savings, or free up the money and spend it elsewhere, like on education.
The primary prevention of breast cancer, the PURE CURE, is not a radical idea, but it certainly is a CHANGE in the way we do business. Currently, less than 2% of all the money spent on breast cancer research is used to apply, or expand the knowledge of, risk reduction strategies. If we honestly want to prevent breast cancer, as we should, we must be willing to spend more than 2% of the money pie trying to do so.
The reform of our nation’s healthcare system has been the longest labor and delivery I have ever witnessed. But at last the baby is born and appears, from the first political Apgar scores, to be viable. Now that our country has finally taken the first, halting breaths of healthcare reform, let us christen this birth with the blessings of prevention, especially the prevention of breast cancer.
Now that we have healthcare reform, it is our individual and collective responsibility to do it right, and that means prevention. Let’s add to the stones our leaders are now placing into the foundation of the American dream by adding pink stones of our own, pink stones for the prevention of breast cancer. Let us shape our future so that breast cancer is merely a shadow of our past, and breast health and healing our bright new, future.
Regards,
Kathleen T. Ruddy, MD
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