) Okay, I'll grant you that dancing around on Youtube dressed as a giant turd was crossing one or two of our oh-so-English cultural boundaries. (Whereas it wouldn't have turned a hair in Germany, where toilets have had stool inspection shelves for the last 140 years
) And yeah, maybe calling herself Bowel Babe was mixing the semantic messaging a little bit. But what the hell, it got her message out there. And the BBC is now reporting a surge in the numbers of people who are getting over their hang-ups and reporting to their doctors for check-ups. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62012858Which is what's so fantastic. I posted on my own experiences a couple of years ago (viewtopic.php?f=86&t=21885), but here's the bottom line of it. Bowel cancer cure rates are above 90% if the disease is spotted early enough. But people are often too embarrassed to even ask the questions, never mind look for answers. And that's incredibly sad. Even sadder is the fact that when an initial test results in a call for a colonoscopy (about 1 in 50 tests), a quarter of the people summoned don't turn up because they're too embarrassed, or because they'd "rather not know".
A couple of statistics. As I've said above, only 2% of the standard FIT ("poohsticks") tests result in a call for a twenty minute hospital examination, and only one in sixteen of those examinations finds a cancer, either active or potential. (The rest find haemorrhoids or IBS, or suchlike.) So the chances of a FIT test at home leading to a surgical process are around one in 800. That doesn't seem worth getting yourself into a state of anxious denial about, does it? Especially when the odds on a fix are so good if they can catch it early.
Anyway, I'll shut up now. Sincere thanks to Deborah James, and to Julie Walters, and to all the other celebs who've had the courage to speak out about one of the stupidest taboos of all.
BJ