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Get ready for pink-ribbon season! October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now in its 25th year, the event promotes awareness of a disease that strikes one in eight women in their lifetimes. And it’s expected to claim nearly 40,000 lives in the U.S. this year alone.

Efforts to bring attention to the disease and raise money for a cure are ongoing. But some women with breast cancer, as well as survivors are troubled by what they see as exploitation. A growing number charge that companies capitalize on suffering to boost profits. And many regard the proliferation of pink ribbons as a marketing ploy.

We’re joined by Kris Frieswick. Her mother passed away from breast cancer, and her article on the dark side of pink-ribbon marketing will appear in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. We also talk to Jeanne Sather, a blogger in Seattle who's currently battling metastatic breast cancer and blogs at The Assertive Cancer Patient. She's known in the breast cancer community for her fight against using pink ribbons as a marketing tool, and is leading a "Boycott October" campaign.

"Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy" by Samantha King

Jeanne Sather's blog post debunking the "one in eight" statistic

(Photo by Premier Packaging via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The placebo effect, when the results from taking a sugar pill has the same effect as a genuine medication itself, was first studied back in the 1950s. Now scientists are finding the placebo effect to be on the rise.

Today, nearly half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials do so because they haven’t been proven to work any better than a placebo. This has pharmaceutical companies running scared, and scrambling to develop drugs for everything from depression to Parkinson's disease that are more effective than placebos.

Steve Silberman is a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, where he wrote about this apparent rise in the placebo effect.

Wired: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

(Photo by ThomasThomas via Flickr/Creative Commons

Everyone knows that health insurance premiums are particularly expensive for small businesses and individuals.

One reason: considerably more of their premium dollars pay for insurance companies’ administration.

NHPR’s health reporter Elaine Grant has the story.

Before he was a governor, Democratic presidential candidate and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean was a physician. So with his understanding of both the political and medical sides of the health care debate, Dean has come up with a prescription of his own for health care reform. We'll hear Howard Dean’s take on the health care debate.

Guests

• Howard Dean, former Vermont governor, Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and former chair of the Democratic National Committee; his new book is Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer

Say you want to quit smoking. One trick is to find a friend who also smokes and then quit together. Co-quitters motivate each other to stick with the program throughout pangs and rough patches. The same team-based approach applies to those wanting to change their diet, start exercising, or cut back on drinking.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are leading the charge to determine what role social connections play in public health. They’ve identified evidence spanning decades that implies that behaviors can radiate beyond close friends and affect a wide circle of people. If their theory has it right, then happiness, depression, drinking, smoking, exercising and overeating pass from person to person like a contagious virus, and public health initiatives targeting individuals are doomed to fail.

Clive Thompson picked up the controversial topic of “social contagion” for The New York Times Magazine, and he joins us to explain.

New York Times Magazine: Is Happiness Catching?

Wired: How Medical Data Revealed the Secret to Health and Happiness

(Photo by Ian Kershaw via Flickr/Creative Commons)