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57
by local cancer committees, doctors, health visitors,
social workers and in other ways. There seems little
doubt that the good results achieved by operation at
an early stage are imperfectly appreciated, even by
the medical profession as a whole, and therefore still
less by the community at large, who look for guidance
in such matters to the profession. It is inconceivable
that if the facts were fully realised the average delay
that now exists between recognition of an abnormality
and application for treatment would not be considerable
reduced.
Educative advice directed towards securing effective
treatment of those earlier conditions which have been
shown commonly to precede cancer and to the avoidance,
so far as possible, of injury, would doubtless also
be of value.
Intensive efforts on a wide scale are now being
devoted to the search for the cause or causes of malignant
disease, and it is earnestly hoped that they will
result in furnishing humanity with some direct means
of controlling the disease through the application of
preventive measures. It must always be remembered,
however, that the discovery of a cause may not necessarily
indicate a means of prevention, and even though
it did, preventive measures could not be expected to
secure early results in cancer, since the bulk of the
evidence indicates that the disease is one of slow
development, due to effective or predisposing causes
operating over a prolonged period. Pending an
achievement of this kind, therefore, no effort should
be spared to reduce suffering and mortality by all
educative and remedial measures now available, and
it is the aim of this memorandum to indicate the
value of such measures in so far as cancer of the breast
is concerned."