Abstract
This medical narrative illuminates the ways in which the standard of clinical breast care provided to women today is insufficient; through personal narrative and health research, I spotlight the gaps in care practices that inhibit women from optimizing breast health. In short, there are innovative tools and practices that, according to evidence-based data, would improve breast care for women. But these alternatives to the current standard of care have yet to be sanctioned by bureaucratic medical regulatory agencies. In other words, despite studies that show the promise of these tools and practices to help women to mitigate a breast cancer diagnosis, they are seldom readily available to patients. This is a critical concern since more and more women are thought to be at a substantial risk for breast cancer today.
While changes to care practices continue to pend indefinitely, breast cancer diagnoses continue to climb. And researchers predict that in the next few decades, the increase in breast cancer diagnoses will be most pronounced among the populations of women living in industrialized nations, nations that have the potential to utilize advanced medical technologies.
The central theme of this medical narrative is that outdated care practices—like teacups and talismans-- must be replaced: healthcare policymakers—those tasked with the responsibility to review and sanction innovations in clinical care—must work to expedite policy reform so that the standard of breast care is fortified by the evolving technologies that promise superior protections against breast cancer.
Among the many outdated care practices impacting patients, there are two that I underscore as particularly constraining when it comes to helping women to optimize breast health. One of these is clinical provider reliance upon overly simple patient histories to quantify breast cancer risk, a practice that fails to provide patients with dependable and accurate appraisals of breast cancer risk. Software-based risk assessment tools provide a better method of comprising risk; and experts contend that more accurate risk assessments would reduce breast cancer mortality by improving the protocols provided to patients as they manage individual risk. Despite the prevalence and promise provided by the risk assessment software, policymakers have yet to mandate that care providers use these tools as a standard component of clinical care.
Another outdated care practice is the standard reliance on mammographic imaging to screen patients for breast cancer; this customary screening practice—often regarded as an important screening for the early detection of breast cancer—is of arbitrary value since up to 50% of women have dense breast tissue which makes cancerous abnormalities almost impossible to detect. More advanced imaging techniques have the potential to provide more reliable screenings; however, these techniques are often restricted to individuals with either a family history of breast cancer or the inheritance of a BRCA mutation.
By committing my personal medical journey to paper, I hope to cast a light on the shortcomings and deficiencies of clinical care and to advocate for the expedition of reform policies to better provide women with access to the technologies that, despite their promise to fortify breast health, remain vastly underutilized across clinical breast care practices.
Recommended Citation
Daoud, Julie
(2025)
"Proffering Teacups and Talismans: How Breast Care Policy Is Failing Women,"
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 10:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol10/iss1/5