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| Please try to help -- don't blame or shame! |
by
Stephanie Pappas,
LiveScience Senior Writer
Sickness and Shame
As if
being sick weren't
bad enough, some
diseases come with a
social stigma that can make
sufferers hide their
illness.
#10
Colon Cancer: Colorectal cancers are very
curable in the early stages, according to the
National Institutes of Health. Unfortunately, colon cancer often sneaks up without symptoms, and even if symptoms do show up, patients may be
embarrassed to talk about diarrhea and abnormal bowel movements with their
doctors. The best way to diagnose colon cancer is early screening, including
colonoscopies.
Journalist
Katie Couric tackled the
stigma surrounding this bowel cancer straight on in March 2000 by televising her colonoscopy. Along the way,
she proved that talking about hidden diseases can
help people seek medical care. According to a 2003 study in the journal
Archives of Internal Medicine, colonoscopy rates went up after
Couric's TV special. Before the campaign, a physician could expect to conduct 15 colonoscopies a month. For 9 months after Couric's on-air procedure, that number jumped to 18 colonoscopies per physician per month.
#9 Erectile Dysfunction: The stigma surrounding erectile dysfunction
has lessened in recent years, thanks to hours of commercials depicting happy, wholesome couples dancing to the soundtrack of an announcer talking about pharmaceutical side effects. But it can still be
tough for men to admit to sexual dysfunction. According to a 2010 review of sexual dysfunction treatments published in the journal
Primary Care: Clinics in Office Practice,
only half of men with erectile dysfunction
get treatment.
Men with erectile problems shouldn't feel alone, however. According to the same report,
10 to 20 million American men have erectile dysfunction, and by age 70, about two-thirds of men have trouble achieving or keeping an erection.
#8 'Manly' Problems: If erectile dysfunction is surrounded by a stigma of unmanliness, some
female disorders come with symptoms that challenge our cultural definitions of femininity.
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, a
hormone disorder that can cause infertility and diabetes, among other medical problem, is often marked by
excessive facial hair. That symptom can leave women struggling to shave, wax or otherwise hide their
hirsutism.
Disorders like hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating, can be stigmatizing to both genders. But the disorder comes with extra baggage for women.
"You know, with women, you don't want to be someone who is sweaty,"
Sophia Wastler, a 36-year-old Virginia woman with hyperhidrosis, told
LiveScience. "It's kind of more of a male characteristic than a female characteristic, so it's quite embarrassing."
#7 Psoriasis: Psoriasis is a
chronic immune disorder that causes patches of cracked
, scaly skin. These outbreaks can be
hard to hide and
understandably embarrassing. The embarrassment is multiplied by people who see psoriasis and shy away, mistakenly believing the disorder is contagious.
According to a 2008 survey by the
National Psoriasis Foundation, 63 percent reported feeling
self-conscious about their skin. More than half, 58 percent, said they felt embarrassed, and one-third said they
limited their social interactions and dating because of psoriasis flare-ups.
#6 Irritable and Inflamed Bowels: Any disease related to excretion is bound to come tied in some sort of stigma.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) aren't exceptions. IBD is actually a cluster of syndromes, all marked by the inflammation of the intestines. IBS is a vaguer diagnosis, but the disorder is marked by intestinal pain, cramping and constipation or diarrhea without the inflammation that marks IBD.
In general, IBS patients feel more stigmatized by their disease than IBD patients, according to a study published online March 2011 in the journal
Quality of Life Research. Among more than 200 IBS patients surveyed, 27 percent said they felt moderately or extremely stigmatized, compared with 8 percent of the more than 200 IBD patients surveyed. The difference may be because
without a clear physical cause,
IBS sufferers feel their disease is
not taken as seriously.
#5 Obesity: Fat stigma has gone global. According to a 2011 study in the journal
Current Anthropology, there are almost
no cultures that don't associate obesity with
laziness and gluttony, despite the fact that many of these same cultures once saw heftiness as a sign of wealth.
Those who would
shame the overweight often say they're
concerned about the person's health. If that's the case, shame is likely to backfire? A 2011 study in the journal Social
Psychology Quarterly found that
shame and stigma hasten physical decline in people who are obese.
#4 Leprosy: Leprosy, or
Hansen's Disease, looms large in the public imagination. The disease is thought to be extremely contagious and believed to result in body parts falling off.
Wrong on both counts. More than
90 percent of people who come in contact with the bacteria that cause leprosy will
fight the disease off without symptoms and without becoming contagious (though humans may be able to catch the disease from close contact with armadillos).
The disease is also
curable with antibiotics. And while the skin lesions caused by the infection can be disfiguring without treatment,
fingers and toes don't just fall off. This
myth likely got its start because nerve damage to digits can cause numbness, putting people with leprosy at more risk of accidental injury or amputation.
#3 Lung Cancer: Like obesity, lung cancer is a condition that
people tend to blame on the victim. The link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer
leads people to believe that
sufferers bring cancer upon themselves. But in fact, thousands of people who have never smoked get lung cancer every year.
Besides, as Jamie Ostroff of
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center pointed out at the
2009 World Conference on Lung Cancer in
San Francisco, people who have smoked are no less worthy of lung cancer treatment than those who have never lit up. According to
LungCancer.org, the disease is the
leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women,
killing more than 158,000 people each year in the
United States.
#2 HPV: Human papillomavirus (HPV) infects the skin or mucous membranes, often asymptomatically. But some strains of the
virus can cause cervical cancer in women, making them dangerous sexually transmitted infections (STIs). HPV can also cause
genital warts.
HPV became a flashpoint in the
GOP primary elections in September 2011, when Republican candidates criticized Texas Governor and frontrunner
Rick Perry for issuing an executive order in
Texas that would have made
vaccination against HPV mandatory for girls attending school in the state. Many other vaccines are already mandatory in Texas, but the
HPV vaccine is controversial because the virus is
spread through sexual contact. Medical experts say that the vaccine is most effective when
administered before a person becomes sexually active and potentially exposes themselves to the virus. But Perry's attempt to make the vaccine mandatory was shot down by social conservatives, who argue that getting vaccinated may spur teens into early sexual activity.
#1 HIV/AIDS: Perhaps one of the
most famously stigmatized diseases ever,
HIV/AIDS first appeared as a
mysterious syndrome in mostly gay men in the early 1980s. Anti-gay activists blamed gay men's
"immoral" behavior for the spread of the disease, setting up a persistent
victim-blaming attitude.
According to a 1999 study published in the journal
American Behavioral Scientist, 52 percent of Americans still
associated HIV with homosexuality, despite the fact that by that time, only about a
third of new HIV cases were contracted by
gay men. In 1997, the same study found, 55 percent of Americans
believed that most people with AIDS were responsible for their illness, and
28 percent went as far to say that most of them deserved it.
As late as 2006, a
Kaiser Family Foundation report found significant confusion among Americans about HIV. According to the report, 37 percent of Americans
erroneously believed that
HIV could be spread by kissing, while
32 percent thought it could spread via shared drinking glasses.
