2 Minutes to Go for the Gold!

Imagine that you are the head coach of the Olympic Gymnastics team.

For some reason, the last event in the entire games is women’s gymnastics and the US needs a gold medal to lead in the overall medal count. But you have a problem. Your best gymnast broke her wrist, and you need to choose a gymnast to replace her on the team.

Would you choose a person who had tried few handstands in high school, read a book about gymnastics, watched some gymnastic events on television, and went to a stretching class occasionally? Or, would you select a woman who practiced gymnastics every opportunity she had?

Right. You’d choose the woman who practiced gymnastics at every possible opportunity.

It is the same for your breast exam. You want your breast exam to be gold medal quality. You want your breast exam to be done by a physician, a nurse, or a trained professional who practices breast examination at every opportunity.

There is a reason it is called “the practice of medicine.” Your doctor must practice to maintain their skills. Your doctor has to do something repeatedly to be good at it.

You don’t know who will be helped when you ask your doctor to do an annual breast exam on you. You may be OK, but then they will do a better exam on someone else.

On the other hand, if all women expect a clinical breast exam every year, your doctor will be more skilled at doing your CBE and they might find your cancer that was missed by a mammogram.

By asking for good care for yourself, you help improve the care everyone receives. And it may be true the other way around, too: when everyone receives better care, you may be the one who benefits personally. Hopefully you will never find out personally that you have breast cancer; but, unfortunately, someone will, and better skills will help that person whoever she may be.

2 minutes. Every woman. Every year.