It's nearly impossible to pick up a woman's magazine and not find something in it related to breast cancer awareness.

This applies every month, too, not just in the October issue for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But I think we're still failing to reach a huge population of people who can influence women to get mammograms and do monthly breast self-exams: the men in our lives. They read magazines, too, just different ones.

Wouldn't it be terrific to see men's magazines carry stories about men who supported their partners through treatment? Even better, how about having the centerfold model in a men's magazine be a woman who'd a mastectomy with breast reconstruction? Don't you think he would show it to his spouse and generate a conversation about how things have changed?

No longer should women or men hold in their minds the image of the old Halsted radical mastectomy - a truly horrific, debilitating, and disfiguring surgery. Now men would be able to see what reconstruction looks like and have to guess which breast is the reconstructed one!

Do you think men would pay attention if such articles and photographs appeared in men's magazines? Would you consider being that centerfold?

Did you know . . . 40,970 women will die of breast cancer this year.