|
Saving Lives: Why Gender-Specific Medicine
Will Transform Healthcare For Men and Women - Part
3
In parts 1 and 2, I talked about the biological
basis of gender-specific healthcare and quoted
Marianne J. Legato, M.D., founder of the Foundation
for Gender-Specific Medicine. She said,
“We’ve acted as though men
and women were essentially identical except for
the differences in their reproductive function.
In fact, information we’ve been gathering
over the past ten years tells us that this is
anything but true and that everywhere we look,
the two sexes are startingly and unexpectedly
different not only in their normal function but
in the ways they experience illness.”
In part 3, I will explore the evolutionary basis
of our differences and describe our Moonshot for
Mankind mission to improve the lives of men and the
families who love them.
The Evolution of Males and Females: Warriors
and Worriers
Joyce Benenson is a lecturer of Human
Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. In her
ground-breaking book, Warriors and Worriers: The
Survival of the Sexes, Dr. Benenson, who
considers herself a human primatologist, presents a
new theory of sex differences, based on thirty
years of research with young children and primates
from around the world. Her innovative theory
focuses on how men and women stay alive.
“Men and women have evolved to
specialize in preventing death from different
causes,”
says Benenson.
“That way, their children had
two parents who could cover more forms of danger
and thus be able to keep them alive.”
One of the world’s leading experts
evolution, biologist and naturalist Edward O.
Wilson called Warriors and Worriers,
“brave, thoroughly documented,
and written with unusual clarity. It explains
more about the fundamentals of gender
differences—and the meaning of human
nature—than a library of conventional
social science.”
Dr. Benenson calls the primary,
evolutionary-based role of males, to be warriors,
while the complementary role for women is to be
worriers. These two words summarize and simplify
very complex, evolutionary successful survival
strategies. For the maximum benefit of all, women
and men assume different roles. Women’s first
job is to take care of themselves. If they die,
their children are likely to die. Then, they must
take care of the children. Hence, it is good if
they think of all possible dangers to their health
and well-being. In other words, they worry about
everything.
Men must protect the women and children against
attack from other groups of men. They must always
be on guard and be willing to be prepared to fight.
From an early age, males practice being
warriors.
Benenson concludes,
“We are not conscious of being
warriors or worriers. Rather being a warrior or
a worrier is like having a special program
continually running in the background of our
mind.”
She makes clear that we are not prisoners of our
evolutionary past. War is not inevitable, and
societies can learn more peaceful ways to solve
problems. But in order to change, to reduce male
violence in the world, we have to understand the
evolutionary drives that operate, often in our
subconscious minds.
Men’s True Strength and Resilience
Begins With Accepting and Having Compassion for Our
Weaknesses
Too many men who feel weak and powerless inside,
act out their fear and vulnerability by becoming
aggressive and dominating. In her powerful and
important book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the
Present, internationally acclaimed historian Ruth
Ben-Ghiat lays bare the blue-print that
authoritarian leaders have followed over the past
hundred years and empowers us to recognize, resist,
and prevent their disastrous rule in the
future.
She details the rule of leaders from the past
including Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler as
well as modern authoritarian leaders including Jair
Bolsonaro in Brazil, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and
Donald J. Trump in the United States.
“For ours is the age of
authoritarian rulers,”
says Ben-Ghiat,
“self-proclaimed saviors of the
nation who evade accountability while robbing
their people of truth, treasure, and the
protections of democracy.”
I’ve learned that men’s real strength
and power comes from accepting our weakness. The
fear many of us have if I accepted my weakness I
would be dominated by others. The truth is that
accepting ourselves for who we are is our real
superpower and this begins with accepting our
biological weakness.
Sex and Gender, Nature and Nurture: They Can
Never Be Separated
In our complex world we all look for ways to
understand and simplify things. When I was in
college there was a running debate about whether we
were most influenced by our biology or our
environment. More recently there is great confusion
about whether the differences between men and women
can best be understood as biologically based sex
differences or more environmentally determined
social differences.
In an article titled, “Nature or Nurture,
Sex and Gender,” Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the
Stanford School of Medicine, helps clarify these
important issues.
“In recent years, both sides
have capitulated to what seems like an obvious
compromise: It’s both. Our genes and our
environment play leading roles in shaping who we
are. But to Siddhartha Mukherjee, physician and
author of The Gene, this compromise is ‘an
armistice between fools.’ The answer —
nature or nurture — depends on the
question.”
Dr. Minor goes on to discuss Dr.
Mukherjee’s understanding of sex and gender
issues. The genes that govern gender identity are
hierarchically organized, Mukherjee argues. At the
top, nature acts alone. A variation in a single
chromosome determines whether our sex is male or
female.
Gender, on the other hand, is determined lower
in Mukherjee’s hierarchy. There, genes
interact continually with the forces of history,
society and culture, making gender and gender
identity not an either/or, but a spectrum based on
an infinite number of influences and interactions.
Being clear about what questions we are trying to
answer can help us best understand sex and gender
issues.
Our Moonshot Mission for Mankind
Although I have been focused on healing men and
their families since 1972 when I launched MenAlive,
my work took a new turn twenty years ago when I
read a research study by Randolph Nesse, MD and
Daniel Kruger, PhD who examined premature deaths
among men in 20 countries. They found that in every
country, men died sooner and lived sicker than
women and their shortened health and lifespan
harmed the men and their families.
Their conclusions were a call to action for
me:
- “Being male is now the single largest
demographic factor for early death.”
- “Over 375,000 lives would be saved in a
single year in the U.S. alone if men’s risk
of dying was as low as women’s.”
- “If male mortality rates could be
reduced to those for females, this would
eliminate over one-third of all male deaths
below age 50 and help men of all
ages.”
- “If you could make male mortality rates
the same as female rates, you would do more good
than curing cancer.”
At MenAlive I developed new programs that
address issues including male suicide, violence,
irritability, depression, and loneliness—all
issues that we know if treated can improve the
health and well-being of men and their families.
After doing clinical research for many years, Dr.
Marianne Legato wrote the book, Why Men Die
First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan. She
concluded,
“The premature death of men is
the most important—and
neglected—health issue of our
time.”
In 2021 I invited a group of colleagues who have
been doing ground-breaking work in addressing
men’s health issues and together we launched
our Moonshot
for Mankind and Humanity. My forthcoming book,
Long Live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal
Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Offer Hope to
Humanity, describes our work in more detail. We
believe that “hurt men, hurt themselves,
women, and the world” and “healed men,
help themselves, women, and the world.”
Together we can change the world for the
better.
The MenAlive Academy of Gender-Specific
Healthcare
I estimate there are 1,000 organizations that
are doing important work in the area of
gender-specific medicine and men’s healthcare.
There are millions of men and their families who
need help and support. I will be partnering with
Ubiquity University to offer a complete training
program for individuals who want to improve their
own health as well as support men they know and
love. We will also educate practitioners who want
to develop their skills in this emerging and
important field of health care.
There will be four levels of study that we will
be offering:
Foundational Level—Before we can
help others, we have to help ourselves. Everyone
must start with the basics. You will learn why
men are the way they are and how to improve
men’s health. You will be able to take your
own life experience and learn how to better
understand yourself and others by looking at
your health successes as well as your health
problems through the various classes that will
focus on physical, emotional, and relational
health of men.
Intermediate Level—For those who would
like to increase your knowledge and skills so
that you can help others professionally, you
will gain additional skills. If you are already
in the helping professions, you will develop the
added skills you need to expand your practice to
include men’s mental, emotional, and
relational health. If you come to this work from
other professions, it will help you integrate
your previous work with new skills in the area
of gender specific practices that focus on
men’s health.
Advanced Level—This level is for those
who want to advance in the field, increase your
reach and effectiveness, and specialize in
working with certain specific populations such
as young men and boys, mid-life men, or older
men. It is also for those who want to focus on
more specific issues like male anger or
depression.
Master Level—For those who want to reach
the pinnacle of this emerging new field of sex
and gender-specific health care, this will help
you focus your skills and practice to help more
and more people. You may want to write a book or
consult, teach, or train. I believe the world
will need more and more experts at this level
and will be reward both in satisfaction of
helping many more people and also in the
monetary compensation that goes with mastery at
the highest level.
The programs with Ubiquity will allow you to
receive certification at the various levels and for
those interested, also opportunities to receive
college degrees at bachelors, masters, and doctoral
levels for those want their training to go beyond
certification in sex and gender-specific healing to
include bachelors, masters, or doctoral level
degrees. If you would like more information, please
drop me an email to Jed@MenAlive.com
and put “MenAlive Academy of Gender-Specific
Healthcare” in the subject line and I will
send you more details.
©2023 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of seven
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages and his
latest book, The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. For over
38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
Contact
Us |
Disclaimer
| Privacy
Statement
Menstuff®
Directory
Menstuff® is a registered trademark of Gordon
Clay
©1996-2023, Gordon Clay
|
