Week 3: Response to Kushner’s Breast Cancer

Rose Kushner’s breast cancer caused her to be an advocate for the disease. I think this is a very interesting component to finding a way to ensure that there is a significant amount of progress in fighting a disease. I think that the more people who are affected by a disease, the greater the chance there will be a significant amount of advocacy for eliminating that disease. For example, I noticed that the Relay For Life always gets a significant amount of people participating because there are a lot of people who have been affected by cancer. This puts other diseases at a disadvantage because there is not as much money being dedicated to research in other categories. Kushner wrote her book “Why Me? What Every Woman Should Know About Breast Cancer to Save Her Life.” This book helped to raise the awareness about breast cancer and the way that it was treated. It put an emphasis on the disease so that there was concentration on finding ways to eradicate the disease.

I think she made major contributions to the treatment of breast cancer, and even though many of the ways she was advocating treating breast cancer were dismissed at the time, her ways of looking at treatment are relatively commonly employed today. I think this may be an indication about how gender was treated at the time of her writing. Perhaps if she were a male her theories about treatment would be taken more seriously during that period. The 1970s was a period where feminism was really taking hold, but it had not made the type of progress to the point where a woman would be taken as seriously as a man. For this reason, the practices that Kushner was advocating were not being used.