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Should We Pay More Attention to Men's
Health?
Men die six years sooner than women. There are more
than four widows for every widower.
So, it would only seem fair that more health
research and health education dollars be spent on
men than on women. Yet in the budget of every
federal health agency, more money is spent on
women’s health than on men’s. There are
seven federal health agencies specifically for
women. Not one for men. 39 of the 50 states have an
office of women’s health, only six have one
for men. A search of more than 3,000 medical
journals listed in Index Medicus found that 23
articles were written on women’s health for
each one written on men’s. Although a woman is
only 14 percent more likely to die from breast
cancer than a man is from prostate cancer, funding
for breast cancer research is 660 percent greater
than funding for prostate cancer research. Even the
post office has gotten into the act: there is only
one disease for which you can buy a postage stamp
and the profits will go to research to cure the
disease: breast cancer, even though heart disease
kills millions more men prematurely. Before the age
of 65, men die of heart attacks at three times the
rate of women.
The bias against men is not limited to
government-funded efforts. Even though men die
younger and men’s last years are spent in
worse health than women’s, most media and
private sector attention goes to women’s
health: features on menopause on CNN, articles on
osteoporosis in the Kaiser Permanente newsletter,
and nonstop corporate-sponsored fundraisers for
breast cancer: runs for breast cancer, walks for
breast cancer, even go to an A’s game for
breast cancer. Baseball, a game played by and
watched primarily by men, has a Breast Cancer Day,
but not a Heart Attack Day, even though millions
more people—primarily men—die prematurely
of heart disease. Yet when the media pays attention
to heart disease, most of it is focused on women,
even though women get heart disease long after the
average man is dead.
Defenders of the bias offer excuses such as,
“Men got most of the research money in the
past. Let’s even the score.” The
implication is that researchers were interested in
making only men healthy. Medical research was done
mainly on men because such research was often done
on volunteers from prison or the military, the vast
majority of whom were men. And in other studies,
men were preferred because of fear that unborn
babies could be damaged or that menstrual hormonal
changes during the study would affect the results.
It was believed—and for the most part, it has
proven true--that the results of studies using men
would be generalizable to women. And did men
inadvertently benefit from having been guinea pigs?
Men still live six years shorter than women, a gap
that, over the past four decades, has decreased by
just one year.
Another excuse for the underspending on
men’s health is, “Men just need to
organize like we women do.” I don’t hear
women making that argument to other groups. Could
you imagine feminists responding to
African-Americans’ concerns about lack of
funding with, “Blacks just need to organize
like we women do”?
Most often, underspending on men’s health
is justified by blaming men themselves for their
early demise: “If they only saw their doctor
more often.” Fact is, far more potent than
doctor visits in staving off the major killers
(cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes) are
avoiding overweight and not smoking. Yet women, not
men, have higher rates of obesity and smoking.
Despite that, I have not heard feminists or
liberals saying, “It’s women’s own
fault. Let’s not fund research on women and
heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.” They
want ever more money spent on women’s health.
Nor do liberals say, “AIDS is caused by
careless behavior so we shouldn’t spend money
on AIDS.”
Only when straight men are involved, do the
liberals sound like conservatives, telling men to
pull themselves up by the bootstraps. With women,
gays and minorities, the message is, “It takes
a village.”
A fair society cannot have it both ways. It
either needs to decide to allocate resources based
on a group’s deficits or spend in proportion
to the population: men 49% and women 51%,
minorities 25% and whites 75%, heterosexuals 98%
and homosexuals 2%. A double standard that hurts
straight men is grossly unfair.
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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