Breast Cancer: The Death Sentence: The Socio-economic and Socio-cultural paradox of the underprivileged in Ghanaian Society

Abstract

For most rural dwellers, breast cancer is a death sentence. While the concern and discourses of health practitioners and professionals, researchers and analysts may focus on medical attention and the creation of awareness, defined as a deliverance from ‘ignorance’, the personal experience of victims of breast cancer and the members of the community in which they are embedded have a different take. Their focus is more on the origins of the illness and its management in waiting for the ultimate inevitable fate. The paper uses the approach of personal experience and Guttenplan’s categories of consciousness/experiencing, attitude/attitudinizing, and act/action/activity to undertake a somewhat longitudinal examination to investigate the anatomy of the decision-making processes involved in such incidents -  socio-cultural and socio-economic -involving personal and family perspectives, facts/experiencing, beliefs, critical decision-making processes and conclusions attendant with the course of management of the disease through a case study. It concludes that the outlook as currently enacted on what creates and causes delayed medical attention may need to be more critically reviewed. It recommends that the acceptance of seeking medical attention for perceived ‘death sentence’ diseases such as breast cancer should first tackle the certainty of ‘cure’ and the solidarity with victims to ‘fight’ and ‘defeat’ the disease rather than on awareness creation based on unexamined and unsupported assumptions of ‘ignorance’ of victims and their communities that make the efforts to tackle the breast cancer menace in Africa not as effective as they could be.