Opinion: Best time to deliver public health messages? When people are thinking about their health
I was 31 years old when my mother was dying of breast cancer. One day, while sitting with her in the hospital, her oncologist asked me a question no one had ever asked me before: “Have you had a mammogram yet?”
Even though my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 34, I had never thought about getting a mammogram or discussed it with my doctor. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have access to health care. The problem was that no one ever suggested that a mammogram was right for me, given my family history.
