Do you pay as much attention to your personal health as you do to the maintenance of your car? Ken Goldberg, MD, asks that question of all his male patients.
"Rather than advise men to have their prostates tested or to guard against heart disease, I recommend them dropping the ‘bulletproof’ attitude, getting involved in health screenings and realizing that illness can happen to anybody," claims Goldberg, who in 1989 established the first center specializing in male health.
Whilst men have to pay great attention to their health, they also must know where to seek help. Some of them in the healthcare field feel that the healthcare community in the United States does not do enough for men.
No Leaders
"Nobody on the national or state level is leading the general charge toward improving men’s health care," explains Goldberg. "For example, the National Institutes of Health has an office of women’s health but they do not have one for men."
"We hear really a lot about women’s and children’s health," states Alvin Baraff, PhD, initiator of MenCenter Counseling in Washington, DC "For male health care to improve, we need to see more male physicians in the media informing men about their health needs."
The Men’s Health Network, a nonprofit lobbying and information organization in Washington, DC, reports that men’s life expectancy in the United States is more than 10 per cent lower than women’s. Over the past thirty years, the mortality rate has risen more for men than for women in all age categories.
"Various statistics prove that men suffer higher rates of death and more severe diseases than women for most of their adult lives," claims Martin Miner, MD, of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of New England in Swansea, Mass. Miner is researching five hundred physical male workers, aged between 30 and 70, to discover which factors can pull them into physicians’ offices for health screenings. Baldness and impotence lead the way.
Care for the Whole Man
A lot of men are not aware where to seek help when they need it with gender-related worries, such as finding a lump on a testicle or experiencing serious erectile dysfunction.
"I am convinced that there are no more than five men’s health centers in the United States," claims Tony Lanzillo of the New Jersey Institute for Men’s Issues, a lobbying organization. "We intend to bring men’s health to leaders in government, business, academia, and politics, thereby establishing more men’s health centers that will be able to take better care of the whole man."
However, some people in the field do not believe that men’s health is neglected. "There is no office for men’s health due to the fact that for many years men were the ones being examined in clinical research," explains Ellen Pollack, spokeswoman in the office of research on women’s health at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. "And those results were used for the treatment of everybody. This office was founded to make sure women were included in clinical research and that the studies was concentrating on issues relevant to women’s health."
Probably, the real problem has less to do with studies and more with conveying the findings of the studies to men. Baraff is convinced that the media can play an essential role in this effort. "A good start would be health spots in the course of sports shows," he claims.
