Battling Breast Cancer With ‘Tupperware Party of ‘90s’

It’s a delicate problem.

Orange County women stand a higher chance of contracting breast cancer than American women in general, possibly because more women here postpone childbearing until they’re over 30, practitioners say.

But here, as elsewhere, women typically don’t self-examine their breasts each month for lumps or other changes--a highly recommended practice that can lead to early detection and effective treatment. What’s more, many don’t do self-examinations correctly, practitioners say.

St. Jude Medical Center sees the problem as a matter of education. “Women think they already know this stuff. Then they go to a [breast-health] class and find out, ‘Gee, I wasn’t doing this correctly, “ says Mary Gerbracht, a clinical nurse specialist who manages St. Jude’s Breast Center in Fullerton.

Gerbracht and other trained instructors at St. Jude are part of a marketing experiment aimed at spreading the word about self-examinations through Tupperware-style gatherings.

A small group of women gather in a friend’s living room for refreshments, chitchat and some straight talk about breast health.

St. Jude gives the hostess a $50 gift certificate to Nordstrom and provides a free instructor who gives a 45-minute talk. Women practice on silicone breast models, learning to apply varying levels of pressure with their fingers and recognize tissue irregularities by touch.

“I show you what position your body should be in, I show you which part of your fingertips you should use and what pattern you should use. You have to cover all the tissue in dime-sized circles, using three levels of pressure--light, medium and deep,” Gerbracht says. “Once you know how to do it, you can do it in 5 to 10 minutes.”

Still, this in-home brand of educational outreach--billed by St. Jude’s as the Tupperware Party of the ‘90s--has been slow to catch on. Only six such gatherings have been held since the center started offering them last spring, though the center hopes to stir up more with increased marketing efforts.

Barbara Marsh covers health care for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7762 and at barbara.marsh@latimes.com