The cancer industry is a group of businesses and organizations with aligned interests in reference to cancer and public policies for handling the problem. The medical establishment is often viewed as belonging to the cancer industry due to the incentives in place for taking a curative approach rather than a preventive one. Cancer associations such as the American Cancer Society have also been implicated partly due to their depiction of cancer as a disease rather than simply side effects of poor health that happen to manifest in certain tissue. Some believe that the cancer industry deliberately avoids focusing on methods for reducing the occurrence of cancer in order to guarantee the cancer industry's continued existence. Much of its profits are derived from chemotherapy. Some critics, such as Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action, say that the cancer industry's creation of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which focuses on early detection, distract from critical questioning about causation.
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