Curing Cancerphobia by David Ropeik

Author:David Ropeik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ethnicity, Race, Religion

In addition to those of lower SES, or some like Lara at high risk, people in certain ethnic and cultural groups, and those of deep religious faith, are also less likely to screen for cancer. Here too fatalism seems to play a significant role.

As of 2010, Latino men were less likely to participate in prostate cancer screening, either by PSA or by digital rectal exam (41%), than white men (57%) or African American men (59%), even though prostate cancer was the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Latino men in the United States (131 per 100,000). One reason, researchers report, is the powerful cultural norm among Latino men of manliness—machismo. As several subjects in the study told Z. A. Rivera-Ramos and L. P. Buki, they feared finding out that they had prostate cancer because “if I have prostate cancer I will no longer be a man.” One Mexican American man described his fatalism this way: “Machismo is always machismo, right? But if one has a [serious] illness like this one [prostate cancer], holding machista views doesn’t help … [In that case] one may as well die because, due to machismo, one will not want to get [medical] care.”25 Finding out that they had prostate cancer would mean facing a frightening choice, between the cultural importance of manliness versus treatment that might save their lives but that would threaten that manliness. So to avoid the sense of powerlessness that such a no-win choice would create, they choose not to screen, not to know—avoiding that difficult decision altogether. The research is clear about the effect this form of cancer fear has on health. As Rivera-Ramos and Buki reported, “Due, in part, to lower rates of screening … Latinos are almost four times as likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage than non-Latino Whites.”26

Fatalism also seems to discourage some Latina women from mammography. One study reported: “In Hispanic women, great fear of cancer is associated with extreme fatalism about the disease. Most believe that cancer cannot be cured, and a diagnosis is considered a death sentence. This fear leads to the avoidance of the subject (and mammography).”27 A literature review found, “Many Hispanic women strongly believe that the fear of finding cancer would deter them from screening,” and noted, “Several studies report that many Hispanic women would prefer not to know the diagnosis of breast or cervical cancer.”28 In interviews with American women who had moved from Mexico or from Central or South America, researchers found, “Because informants believed that breast cancer is fatal, they anticipated that knowledge of a breast cancer diagnosis would render them terribly hopeless.”29 This fear scared some women away from mammography.

Participant 1: “I’d rather not go, that way the doctor can’t tell me that I have cancer, because just by knowing, that I will, that I will die, just from knowing … if I go to the doctor tomorrow and he tells me ‘You have breast cancer,’ I would die.”

Interviewer: “You would die from knowing or …”

Participant 1: “From knowing.

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