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Each month in October, for 31 days, #BCAM pink ribbons and hashtags flood the chronologies of our social media with information about breast cancer. That's because leading medical and cancer groups said it was National Breast Cancer Awareness Month more than 30 years ago to raise awareness about the disease and to ensure that funding for research is increased.
In addition to skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and the second leading cause of cancer death in women (lung cancer is the first). According to the National Cancer Institute, about 3.4 million American women were living with breast cancer in 2015.
Once diagnosed, women must make decisions about different treatments. Do they need surgery, chemotherapy and radiation? And what about hormonal therapy, which sometimes has to be taken up to 10 years. These are not easy questions. The side effects of these treatments can range from hair loss, nerve damage and memory problems years after treatment. Given these challenges, it is essential to support women during and after breast cancer treatment.
But often, people do not know what to do to help in addition to wearing pink. We recently conducted a study to determine the type of support that could best help women. We hope that the results of our research will give you ideas.
What a woman wants
In our study, we examined how women benefited from breast cancer treatment support. We chose to focus on African American women as they are more likely to die of breast cancer than all other American women. We analyzed interviews with African American women with breast cancer who were previously enrolled in the "placebo group" of an NCI. Operator-funded intervention study, "HISTORY (Sisters tell others and resurrect"). During the interviews, we asked women a series of questions such as "What kind of support did you get from your doctor (and other providers)? to help you through the treatment? "to," How did the support you received from others influence your treatment decisions? "
Our results showed that women benefited from support in three ways. Sometimes the support women received met their needs, sometimes it was better than expected and sometimes it was not. The women explained how they expected cancer providers to provide informative support:
"I have received a lot of information, printing information and other things, and if I had any questions, I received a number that I 've I called. When I went to the hospital to have my port [for chemotherapy] put in and everything, they were really good there. They sent me a lot of information and I had a person who, if I had any questions, was there for me. All I had to do was make a phone call and, all that I needed, she was there. – Lydia (pseudonym), 52 years old, five years after the diagnosis
The women also explained how their family supported them in a more emotional way, by encouraging and in attendance, and concretely, such as cooking and housekeeping. Some also explained how useful it was for their clergy to pray for them and remind them, "God was going to bring me to a successful end."
Second, support exceeded women's expectations when cancer care providers encouraged women and offered them emotional care that went beyond information about treatment:
"He [my doctor] says, "It's okay." The doctor to whom he referred me actually … treated his wife and, of course, his wife died, but he said that she lived a long time. She did very well under him, and he ended up sending me to the same doctor. And that made me a little quieted … because he shared his personal experience with me and that changed my treatment. – Eddie, 56, five years after diagnosis
Third, women described situations in which the support of others was not helpful. This often occurred when providers, family or friends were unaware of or did not recognize that the needs of the victim might have changed:
"(Everyone was trying to do too much … sometimes just say," Drop it, I'm fine. "- Shelly Ann, 64, six years after the diagnosis.
Some women even stated that they had not told people in their lives that they needed another form of support because they did not want to be a burden. .
Support is crucial
Although our study focuses on African-American women, the results of an analysis of four large studies including 9,267 women further confirm how crucial support is for women with breast cancer . These larger studies have shown that women who had limited support from family and friends after breast cancer diagnosis were at higher risk of breast cancer recurrence and some had even a higher risk of death.
This means that women with breast cancer must be informed that the help of others can have a positive impact on their disease. What this means for those who wish to support breast cancer survivors, is that family and friends must be willing to offer different types of support, as suggested by the American Cancer Society and the Komen Foundation, for example by listening when they want to express their feelings. , or leading them to a doctor's appointment.
Family and friends should also know that survivors' support needs may change over time. The key moments of their needs can change, especially when they move from one type of treatment to another, for example from surgery to chemotherapy, or when they have completed all their prescribed treatments for breast cancer.
As breast cancer is not a static event, but rather a journey of physical and emotional changes, there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to support women with this disease. Knowing how to best help breast cancer survivors is an ongoing process of changing expectations and needs, based on their treatment experience.
Further research is needed to understand why and how different forms of social support improve breast cancer survival among different groups of breast cancer survivors. In the meantime, let's continue to fight breast cancer by promoting mammography and helping women around us with breast cancer.
This article is republished from the conversation
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