October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a time we typically associate with women, mothers, and pink ribbons. But what many of us don't realize is that men can also be victims of this deadly disease.
Harvey Singer, a breast cancer survivor and the creator of HISBreastCancer.org, joined hosts Jacob Soboroff and Janet Varney on HuffPost Live to discuss his experience as a man with breast cancer.
“The medical community was not set up to handle guys with this disease,” Singer shared. “That’s when things really started spinning for me. I started looking at alternatives and what I was going to do for surgery. You have to be your own personal advocate for this disease.”
Because the cause of his breast cancer was hormonally driven, Singer was given the same types of treatments women receive despite differences in the levels and types of hormones he was producing. “They don’t know how to segregate that from a male and a female, so they just treat you with the common things they would treat a woman with. That was the most disturbing part to me.”
Dr. Richard Clapp, founder and former director of MA Cancer Registry and Epidemiologist/Professor Emeritus at Boston University Dept of Environmental Health and Mike Partain, born at Camp Lejeune during what has become known as one of the worst contaminated drinking water tragedies in American history, discussed this topic with Soboroff, Varney, and Singer.
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