What Good Is 'Raising Awareness?'

Just being educated about diseases isn't enough to make people healthier.
JULIE BECK

In 2010, a strange meme spread across Facebook. People’s feeds were suddenly filled with one-word statuses saying the name of a color, nothing more. And most of these posts were from women.

The women had received messages from their Facebook friends that were some variation on this, according to The Washington Post: "Some fun is going on . . . just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status. Haha."

Oh, okay. It was for breast cancer awareness. Except, no, wait—how? The Susan G. Komen Foundation had nothing to do with it, though it did get them some Facebook fans, according to the Post story. It wasn’t clear at all who started it. There was no fundraising component to the campaign. And the posts weren’t informative at all. In fact, their whole point was to be mysterious. Maybe people asked their friends what they meant by just posting “beige” or “green lace” and then they had a meaningful conversation about breast cancer screenings and risk factors, but I’d guess that happened rarely, if at all.

This incident is just one example of the nebulous phenomenon of “raising awareness” for diseases. Days, weeks, months are dedicated to the awareness of different health conditions, often without a clear definition of what “awareness” means, or what, exactly, is supposed to come of it.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/what-good-is-raising-awareness/391002/