Men still characterized as reticent to discuss intimate health issues

Article here. Excerpt:

'Men are still dying of prostate cancer because they are too embarrassed to visit a doctor.

They see medical examinations and discussions of intimate problems as a ‘violation’ of their privacy and masculinity, a study shows.

Despite decades of campaigning to raise awareness of prostate cancer many men are ignorant about the disease and its effects. It is now a bigger killer than breast cancer.

A second study – of more than 800,000 patients in England – found that men with full-time jobs are twice as likely as women not to have seen a GP over the past year.'

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What needs to be done on prostate cancer: Britain's top experts reveal why the funding of research into the disease desperately needs to match that of breast cancer

'While breast cancer mortality rates have plummeted – by 10 per cent in five years, according to Cancer Research UK – prostate cancer mortality rates have increased by 21 per cent since the early 1970s.

Experts say this growing gap between men and women is no accident. Over the past 20 years, breast cancer has benefited from a national screening programme, significant investment in research and more than double the number of published studies compared with ones for prostate cancer.

Professor Chris Eden, a consultant urologist based at the Royal Surrey County Hospital and the pioneer of keyhole prostate cancer surgery in the UK, calls the death figures ‘an indictment of a system that fails men’.'

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Comments

As usual these shallow dialogues attacking masculinity as the cause of all problems, including poor health outcomes for men, are based on feminist hate speech, and poor academic rigor. It usually means some researchers are desperate for a publication, and instead of actually researching the problems with mens health, they just recycle the same old social science feminist dialogues (note the obligatory abundant Courtenay references! the recycler of Connells embittered hegemonic masculinities).
Problems and flaws:
Note the abscence of any investigation of the services provided to men. Institutionalised discrimination is not even addressed.
Feminist critiques of masculinity are discussed tautologically, and not challenged. The reader would be correct to concluded that the apportioning of blame on men for their poor health outcomes was pre-determined.
The article provides no solution, other than changing men; i.e. before we can address health outcomes in men we must address the flaws in masculinity. Imagine if this approach was proposed for indigenous people or women.

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