How many times a year do you see “charitable” or “memorial” events and themes like Breast Cancer Awareness Month where everything is pink, or 10K runs for charity, or Military Appreciation day/weekend, or any number of (allegedly) well-meaning events that are nothing more than B.S., including the old MDA Telethon & the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?

Why are they B.S.?  It’s because they are neither formed to advance the cause they represent, nor do they do anything more than make the participants look better in the public eye, and make them feel better because they think they’re doing something productive & charitable, or they know better and they think you believe that.  Or both you and them are drinking from the same punch bowl of Kool-Aid.

The first target on my hypocrisy range-finder is Breast Cancer Awareness (BCA) Month.  For an entire month, everything turns pink.  People do this because humans are social animals, and due to social media & its deep tentacles, everyone has an eye on each other, so many people go along to keep from being ostracized either privately or publicly.  Many people think that wearing pink or getting involved in any event promoting the idea is good work.  On the contrary . . .

According to the Maurer Foundation, whose mission statement is to promote BCA, breast cancer rates for women under 50 have remained stable since 1985 when the BCA movement started, and breast cancer rates for women over 50 have remained stable since 2002.  There was a spike in cancer rates in the 90’s  simply due to overdiagnoses, which means either finding breast cancer that didn’t need to be treated, or finding something that was believed to be breast cancer, but wasn’t — a false positive.  In every 1,000 women, according to research done in 2015 by a group funded by the Norwegian Cancer Society, appx 200 of them either get a false positive, and up to 50 more women of them either have a cancer overdiagnosed, or are later found to not have cancer after a biopsy is done, and 3 of them get cancer in-between screenings, which means screening didn’t find it as it became visible only between visits & screeening did no good.  That means 25% of women who get screened are not being served by the screenings and will be falsely diagnosed or incur medical bills & a lot of mental anguish for nothing.  Only 2 out of 1,000 will be saved by the screens.

Your first response is that it’s worth it if we save 2 out of 1,000, but what you don’t realize is the physical discomfort & mental stress experienced by the 25% who get diagnoses that don’t help them and actually harm them.  In fact, the regular rate of death by any means would have gotten to those 2 people anyway.

Many people use BCA Month as a means to amplify their own self-worth by acting as troopers in the search for a cure & devoting their time to the cause.  Many businesses use it to pander to the masses to increase traffic & sales.  There are many bars & restaurants that hold annual “charity” event where they get people together in their bar to give money to the cause either by straight donation or by contest raffle, or by auctioning off items given to the event for free by local merchants, or all of the above.  Of course, these participants are eating & drinking at the venue & making them a tidy profit, of which they may possibly not give any away to the charity they’re allegedly “supporting”, or maybe a token gift as a brokerage fee for allowing them to use their name to bring people into the bar for a profit.

Have you ever wondered why BCA takes place in October each year?  Every major sport is operating its season during this time — football, basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis & NASCAR.  They have expanded to Mother’s Day so they can double dip & get baseball involved heavily.  It’s all about marketing and sales, not BCA.  Remember that.

Even the prostate cancer people are learning how to run this game and now they’ve appropriated Father’s Day as their own awareness week.  But prostate cancer awareness (PCA) is another B.S. movement designed to simply part you from your logical reasoning & your money.

A British study in 2018 called CAP & published in the JAMA said that after studying 400,000 men over a 10-year period, prostate cancer rates were essentially the same whether men got screening or not, and that men die from it at the same rate, which is 0.29%; that is 29% of 1%, i.e., about 3 in 1000.  Most men die WITH prostate cancer, not FROM it.  Prostate cancer is a slow-growing cancer, and most men who get it can simply live with it and have a normal live expectancy and die from some other cause totally unrelated, like old age itself.

Another problem is that the gold standard of testing is the PSA test, which is fairly inaccurate.  It may result in the same problem many women have who are screened for breast cancer — overdiagnosis & unnecessary biopsies.  And people who are screened for colon cancer & cervical cancer typically are recommended to stop screening when they reach an age where it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, i.e., by the time you could get either one of those cancers, you’ll probably die from something else, usually 75 years old.

I have a lot more charitable B.S. I’ll nail to the wall when I get more time . . .  luckily Jerry Lewis is dead or he’d be pissed at my next update.  So will the Armed Forces, as many people don’t know they’re paying for these military appreciation weekends & flyovers & color guards just like advertisement, and the cost is well into NINE figures . . . and it isn’t working except for those who sell the merchandise.