Why Guys Die Sooner

Sept. 17, 2001 -- From the time they're little boys, guys are taught to be "tough" and not to cry.

 

That social training leads to middle-aged men ignoring chest pains that can warn of heart disease.

 

"Our culture prizes stoicism and courage among men, and teaches men to be somewhat unresponsive to their own physical pain," says Jean Bonhomme, MD, president of the National Black Men's Health Network.

 

And here's what that ultimately means: "Simply stated, men live sicker and die younger than women," says David Gremillion, MD, director of the Men's Health Network.

 

But congressional players and some health advocates are working to get the government into the business of making men tuned in to wellness.

 

There wasn't always this disparity. In 1920, for instance, men and women's life spans were only a year apart -- although women now live almost six years longer on average.

 

Furthermore, men are three times less likely to have visited a doctor in the past year, even after factoring out women's prenatal physician visits.

 

Men also have a higher death rate than women for each of the nation's 10 top causes of death.

 

Prostate cancer, which kills more than 32,000 men each year, is the most commonly diagnosed male cancer -- but many men aren't familiar with it enough to say it correctly. Prostate cancer accounts for 37% of all cancer cases, but gets only 5% of research funding.

 

"Women have more cultural freedom to talk about what hurts them," according to Bonhomme. "We don't have enough public information about male health problems like prostate cancer."

What's Afoot on Capitol Hill

Veteran lawmaker Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) is a decorated fighter pilot who was shot down in enemy territory during the Vietnam War. But he tells WebMD that his life's biggest scare was hearing from his doctor in 1998 that he had prostate cancer.

 

Cunningham says that his getting cancer was part of the catalyst behind his introduction of legislation that would establish a new office in the U.S. health department to "coordinate and promote the status of men's health."

 

Cunningham's ally on the bill, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), MD, tells WebMD, "Men tend to deny that they have anything, and they have this 'he-man' attitude which makes them not go for checkups and not do the things that would make their health statistics better. We are trying to make people more aware of what could be done if they would let people know they had a problem."

 

The bill has 76 co-sponsors in the House, including women and men, Democrats and Republicans.

 

The idea is to follow in the footsteps of women's health offices; there are at least six such bureaus scattered through the federal health bureaucracy.

 

No one has stepped up yet in the Senate with the bill, but the Cunningham legislation has an endorsement from the Society for Women's Health Research. "Our quest to improve medical care must include a sex-based approach to meet the unique treatment needs of both men and women," says the society's president, Phyllis Greenberger.