Hi every On Tuesday October me and Rebecca met with one of the speakers from the Breast cancer in women of Color conference, Karen Schmitt. Karen is the Director of the Northern Manhattan cancer screening partnership at Columbia University. She spoke about the services they provide... there are two types of services in seven different offices. In-reach services is that patients come to office and they get free screening and if they were diognose they help them to apply for Medicaid Cancer Treatment Program for immediate services but there are some patients who do not qualify for that too. New York prespeterian has funds for those patients not qualified for medicaid. they also provide Out-reach services by looking out for patients who are in need andmake sure all patients get the type of treatments they can' get. About nutrition effects on cancer she added that the message for cancer is healthy lifestyle. Therefore exercise has a role, and having healthy food has an effects but the real cause of cancer is unknown.
Among the women of color the cancer is not as common as in white women but African American women has high mortality rate... maybe because when they go under chemotherapy their white blood cells level dramatically drops so they need to wait for the blood cells get back to normal in order to proceed with chemotherapy again.
the other issues Women of color has, are emotional issues, Socioeconomic issues, low level of health literacy. So we need to make sure everything we write in a pamphlet should be really basic level.