Cancer evidence - really? Based on what?

Most of us assume, without really thinking about it, that the cancer advice we're given was worked out by studying people like us. The age you get called for screening, maybe the drug you're offered.  Somebody did the research, and this is what it found. Win.

Dr Bookie Ayodele is a consultant medical oncologist specialising in breast cancer at University Hospitals of Leicester, and head of the Breast Cancer Clinical Trials Unit at the Leicester Cancer Research Centre. She spends a good deal of her time asking who was actually in that research. And it's not a comfortable answer.

Because the trials, the genetics, the screening thresholds and the photographs in the textbooks were largely built around one population. If you weren't in it, like black and other under represented communities, the answer you're being handed was worked out on somebody else. 

Your community, she says, was simply not taken into account.

She talks here about a woman still waiting, three years on, for a screening letter that never came. About support groups where the jokes don't land, because it's not your culture so people quietly stop going.

About being told in community halls that people had assumed cancer was a white person's problem, because that's what all the pictures showed. That black community didn't see themselves in the photos.

This is #CancerCanDoOne and Dr Ayodele talks now to Mike Kinnaird about what's gone so wrong, asks why cancer data is not taking all communities into account, and ultimately, who is accountable? Or not.