Angelina Jolie

Started by Denn Forever, May 14, 2013, 10:22:06 AM

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ardal

There's a 60% chance or sunshine, rather than,
there's a 40% of rain?

Sue that

balladmaker

The whole discussion has massive significance for any woman who has been adapted.  If she has no knowledge of family history i.e. whether or not her bioligical mother has had breast cancer or not, or any other family history, she is faced with deciding whether to get the test done to check if she has the defective gene.

deiseach

I can understand concerns that this might lead to a glut of people demanding that if a procedure is good enough for Angelina it's good enough for them. But on balance I think her decision, while not one I'd wish on anyone, is a positive development. My next door neighbour in Liverpool was* a genetic counsellor. Her job was to discuss the options with people like Angelina Jolie and help them through the ordeal. For her, the biggest problem was that people were obviously reluctant to take such a massive step, especially when they'd often be perfectly healthy at the time. Countless times she would be nudging people in what the numbers were telling her was the right direction - you can't come out and say "have the bloody op, you're a walking timebomb!" - and countless times they would say no only to fall victim to cancer later. If she was still doing this job, I'm certain she'd be pleased that this difficult task has been made a bit easier for health care professionals, or at least a bit more understandable to the laywoman.

*I saw 'was', she got cancer herself and (unsurprisingly) left the job. Happily she's made a full recovery.

Wildweasel74

I see Frankie put his foot (sorry mouth) in it again with a few crude jokes in relation to this. I think there is a misunderstanding of the chances of her developing breast cancer, she was 87% more likely to get it than normal, which put her down as a 1 in 4 chance of getting it overall