Peggy Orenstein, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, questions the focus on breast cancer awareness and screening in light of the latest research, especially if it comes at the expense of research into treatment and a cure.
I think that one of the big issues, in terms of the cultural piece of this, is that our anxiety and fear about breast cancer (which is real, it's a really scary disease, I don’t want to minimize it, 40,000 women a year die of it), but how we manage that fear and how we understand risk and how we approach it is really important to making good medical decisions and good funding decisions.
--Peggy Orenstein