[Breast cancer: how women think and what they do]

Changes brought about by the diagnosis and treatment of cancer always cause psychological, social, cultural, economic and spiritual disorders. We have tried to understand the significance of breast cancer for women and to find out what they do in order to detect it in an early stage. We have randomly chosen thirty-four women who went to a cancer prevention centre in the town of Fortaleza. We have carried out clinical examinations of the breasts, taught the circular self-examination technique and observed how the technique was learnt. We have analysed the results by means of an interactionist approach, and they have been organised according to their significance and to the development of early detection actions. We have concluded that women perceive cancer as a possibility of loss and death and make associations between people or past events and real or imaginary causes. Some of them perform early detection procedures, but the lack of information on the disease is evident, which makes it unfeasible to control breast cancer.