Wearing pink to raise awareness of breast cancer is pointless virtue signaling, i.e., broadcasting an opinion or support for something you really don’t care about or don’t understand in the first place. The same thing is happening now with “support” of Alzheimers.

A number of organizations & businesses are lighting their buildings in the color teal today (Fri, Nov. 1, 2024) in support of people with & a cure for Alzheimers. It’s pointless and has no effect on the disease & is just a waste of time & money. The only thing that will help is more research to find a cure & effective treatment. People who have Alzheimers & their caretakers don’t need your support or concern — they need treatment & a cure.

The “pinkwashing” support for breast cancer has been going on now for 30+ years and it’s done little to stop breast cancer or to lessen its impact on society. 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. What affects it is the medical community doing more to get women screened for it, not the general public making people aware of it by wearing a pink ribbon or pink clothing.

In fact, the guidelines we go by today have caused some trouble as we’re seeing more false diagnoses and more unnecessary procedures that are painful & costly & mentally burdening, which the medical community say is a necessary by-product of better screening, but it’s because current screening isn’t good enough to determine what’s cancer and what isn’t.

Lately, the cancer rate for women under 40 has stalled, meaning we’ve reached the bottom of the curve for them, though the rate is trending downward slightly for those over 40. However, this has nothing to do with people wearing pink in the general public. It’s due to what the medical community has done in the past decades to find it.