Awareness Group Video Wants Ladies to Keep A-Breast of What's Important

Friday, January 14, 2011

Will singing about breasts save lives? The ladies at a local breast health group hope so.

Using the famous Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive,” but with different lyrics, the group Beyond Boobs has launched a fun dance video to remind young women that it’s important to do regular breast self exams.

“Our goal is to try to address breast health and to try to reach younger women and get them to start life-saving habits early,” says group co-founder Mary Beth Gibson. “You Tube is a way to do that – and, we love to dance!”

The women in the group, who are all breast cancer survivors, want to make sure young women practice early detection techniques regularly. “If doing your breast exams were as routine as flossing your teeth, we could dramatically reduce the number of women dying of breast cancer, because early detection is life saving,” adds co-founder Rene Bowditch.

What better way to get the message out than to come up with fun lyrics, add them to a catchy song that everyone knows, and then dance around a football field while demonstrating a breast self-exam? (Don’t worry; the video is not R-rated). “If we can do it on the William & Mary football field while dancing, we KNOW you can do it in the shower once a month!” Bowditch and Gibson say.

The ladies hope the “Self-Exama” video will go viral and get people laughing – and thinking, too. Though most instances of breast cancer are in older women, Gibson points out that younger women need to be vigilant, too, and start paying attention to the norms of their bodies. “Like the video says, ‘if you’re old enough to have ‘em, you’re old enough to check ‘em!’” she says.

The dancers, aside from the Beyond Boobs mascot the Good Health Fairy, are college students and a few young ladies from the pages of the group’s most recent calendar. There may be a stray gentleman in there, too. Everyone was a good sport about participating, according to Gibson.

The new video is the first in a series in the “Lights, Camera, (Breast Health) Action!” program that will produce fun, educational public service announcements to promote early detection. “We want to shift the focus from breast cancer awareness to breast health and call all women to action, using our videos to show them how to begin,” says Gibson.

Visit their website for updates on the videos.