Young Women with Cancer
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/cancer-questions-answered
In the December 2008 issue of Women's Health magazine, there is an articel by Abbey Drucker about young women disgnosed with cancer. The article is written as a feature story and the online version of it breaks the article down into mini-profiles.
What I liked about this article are the parts that discuss alternative treatment options and places to find support is diagnosed with cancer. For example, the article lists some online support websites. Also, when the author discusses treatment options, she lists possible risks and benefits for some of the more popular courses of treatment and stresses that because of the young women's age, certain types of therapy normally used may not be their best option.
What I didn't like about this article was the way it profiled the women with some of the less common types of cancer. The first woman was diagnosed with a B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, more commonly found in 67-year-old men and the second with colon cancer. While the article mentioned two women diagnosed with breast cancer, starting the article with very frightening descriptions of these two women's experiences with rare forms of cancer doesn't seem to be the best way to lay out the article. Also, the author doesn't really stress as much as she should how uncommon these two forms of cancer are for young women. Instead, the article talks about these women's experiences started with "common aches and pains and fatigue" that could have been mistaken as being "normal" experiences for athletes or moms but can end up being cancer. I think focusing the article on the women with breast cancer or women with skin cancer may have been more effective. Including the other women's stories is important, but should not be the focus of the article.