An Inflammatory Video on Inflammatory Breast Cancer

An email with an absolutely frightening You Tube Video attachment is screaming its way across cyberspace to your inbox with the subject line “For all women – watch this video. It is no joke!” The video is a news story called “Inflammatory Breast Cancer – the Silent Killer”.

The news story first aired in 2004, as a response to a Seattle woman’s personal campaign to make sure every woman in America knows about this cancer that afflicted her daughter. Since then, according to the station that originally aired the story, the video has made its way to over 10 million women via the internet. The response has been an upswing in information about IBC both on the web and in conventional media, the creation of a foundation that is raising money for IBC research and treatment, and the opening of the first Center for IBS treatment and Research.

And that’s a good thing.

What’s not a good thing

What’s not such a good thing is the tone of the news story. It has all the makings of a viral scare campaign, not the least of which is the “Silent Killer that strikes without warning” phrase. If you didn’t know about IBC before, you sure as heck know about it now, and probably, like me, were up till 3 am scouring the web to learn more because you were convinced that you had it. And that’s what’s wrong with this latest “tell someone” campaign. It’s knowledge predicated on fear.

You need to know that the medical facts in the video are correct. But the context is not. Statements like “Hope for millions of women” give the sense that this is a very common cancer, when it is just not.

IBC is rare. So rare that docs typically never see a case in their entire career, or like me, see one or two cases in twenty years. But instead of having that knowledge reassure you, the news story uses it to scare you. Because if your doctor never sees a case, they are sure to misdiagnose it, so you’d better be sure that you know how to diagnose it yourself.

Would that it were so simple. The problem with IBS is that it’s early symptoms are so common – breast itch, rash, redness, pain. I’m sure all of us have had these symptoms at some point in our lives. And when it presents, IBC looks a heck of a lot like mastitis, a condition that many, many of us (including me) have had at some point.

Thus, another very important fact this that the video doesn’t tell you is this – If you have the symptoms they describe, the odds are overwhelming that it is not IBC.

Some Context

If you read this blog, you know that I applaud anything that empowers women, and I do believe knowledge is power. But knowledge packaged with hype and fear is the wrong kind of knowledge.

So, let me try and do what the video did not. Let me try to give you some context.

The incidence of breast cancer in the US is 100 per 100,000 women per year. Compare that to the incidence of IBC, which is 2 per 100,000 women per year. That’s about 3000 cases of IBC occurring annually in the whole country.

Now, note that 4.3 million Americans are injured and 40,000 more die in auto accidents every year.

I’ll bet you’re really scared now, aren’t you?

That’s okay. There’s always the subway.
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If you want to learn about IBC in a way that will not frighten you, skip the video and visit MayoClinic.com or the National Cancer Institute Website.

Thanks to Linda for tipping me off about this video.