During a televised forum at a woman's hospital in Mexico on the importance of routine breast examination and early cancer detection, a woman with a likely diagnosis of breast cancer addressed the audience. She summed up one of the biggest challenges to overcoming Mexico's high death rate from breast cancer. “Una mujer sin chi es fea,” she said, which when translated means “A woman without a breast is ugly.” Fortunately, the woman she addressed, Felicia Knaul, PhD, has used her own experience with breast cancer and considerable determination to suggest otherwise. “I turned to her and I said, ‘You think I'm ugly?’ ” recalls Dr. Knaul, director of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “She couldn't believe it, and I said, ‘Well, I don't have a left breast.’ ” Dr. Knaul was living in Mexico in 2007 when she was diagnosed with highly invasive breast cancer at age 41 years, after her baseline mammogram revealed a tumor mass. The wife of Julio Frenk, MD, PhD, the former Minister of Health of Mexico, Dr. Knaul has dedicated her professional life to working on health systems and health financing for the poor. However, she was unprepared to deal with cancer on such a personal level. “About 2 weeks after the diagnosis, I went for a long walk,” she says, “and decided that the only thing worse than having chemotherapy was not being able to have it because you didn't have enough money to pay for it.” Dr. Knaul received chemotherapy to treat her cancer, and later launched an education and early detection campaign that became the nonprofit organization Cáncer de Mama: Tómatelo a Pecho (Breast Cancer: Take it to Heart).The honest approach and personal experience, she says, is helping to change minds in a country where breast cancer has soared past cervical cancer to become the number 2 killer of women ages 30 to 54 years, second only to diabetes. According to her husband, the real cancer is the cancer of machismo, a chauvinism that has spurred many women to refuse mammograms for fear that their partners or husbands would leave them at the first hint of breast cancer. Dr. Knaul speaks to a group of Mexican women and men about the importance of early breast cancer detection. Her husband's status as the former health minister, Dr. Knaul says, has helped her make inroads in overcoming the fear and gender discrimination that often stymie early detection. “When they see him stand up and say, ‘A woman is more than a breast, and I didn't leave this woman when she lost her breast and her hair and many other things,’ that has a huge impact,” she says. “We've been as open as possible publicly about discussing the impact of treatment and what it means to live without a breast and what it means to live after this kind of chemotherapy on all aspects of our life as a couple and as a family.” Mexico's health care system provides good treatment options if breast cancer is detected early, Dr. Knaul says, a recognition that has spurred her to keep telling her own story and pushing for more women to be diagnosed before it is too late. -BN BRYN NELSON IS A FREELANCE MEDICAL JOURNALIST. For more information on Tómatelo a Pecho's Spanish-language educational resources and volunteer opportunities, visit http://tomateloapecho.org.mx.