Dis­ease aware­ness daze: Do pa­tients and peo­ple tune out health con­di­tion months and re­lat­ed mar­ket­ing?

Most peo­ple know that Oc­to­ber is Breast Can­cer Aware­ness Month. But it’s al­so Healthy Lung, Na­tion­al AD­HD Aware­ness and Spina Bi­fi­da Aware­ness month. And it al­so in­cludes in­di­vid­ual weeks for Men­tal Health Ill­ness Aware­ness and In­ter­na­tion­al In­fec­tion Pre­ven­tion, along with sep­a­rate aware­ness for World Sight, World Os­teo­poro­sis and World Pso­ri­a­sis days.

If it feels like every month, week or day comes with the recog­ni­tion of a dif­fer­ent health con­di­tion, that’s part­ly be­cause it does. There are more than 200 health and dis­ease aware­ness ob­ser­vances of­fi­cial­ly rec­og­nized by Con­gres­sion­al res­o­lu­tions in the US — from the well-known ones like this month’s Breast Can­cer Aware­ness to the small­er, fo­cused ones like Cholan­gio­car­ci­no­ma Aware­ness Month in Feb­ru­ary.

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