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Men appear to be dying disproportionately from preventable diseases and conditions way more than women, and in many cases it's their own damn fault: because they're refusing to go to the doctor until it's too late.
In interviews with the New York Times, doctors and public health experts expressed concerns with the state of men's preventative care, which they say many chaps tend to ignore — to their own peril.
Breaking this issue down between men and women is fraught for a number of reasons. For one thing, women's health has only been taken seriously by the medical establishment for the past few decades; the FDA wasn't even required to include women in clinical trials until 1993.
Still, there are some indications that medical reticence may be hurting men in sweeping ways.
According to a landmark study conducted by the American Heart Association in the late 1990s, men made up 75 percent of all sudden cardiac deaths, with men aged 45 to 75 particularly likely to die due to coronary artery disease. With symptoms like chest pain and shortness of breath as early warning signs, coronary artery disease can easily be treated if it's caught early enough — but men have to convince themselves to go to the doctor first.
Though heart disease remains the leading cause of death among men globally and in the United States, prostate cancer is another major killer that could be treated effectively by regular screenings. The American Cancer Society estimates that in the US, one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetimes — and that one in 44 men will ultimately die from it.
According to Eric Wallen, the chair of urology at Medical University of South Carolina, a lot of men erroneously believe they don't need to get prostate exams, which are indeed uncomfortable, but probably not much more so than a pap smear.
"I think a lot of people are falling back on, 'Well, that’s not really recommended,'" Wallen told the NYT his patients.
(According to the University of California at Los Angeles' Health system, those screenings very much are recommended for all men between the ages of 50 and 55, or at age 45 if they have a family member with prostate cancer. Any man who has to get up frequently in the night to urinate, often an early warning sign of prostate trouble, should also get checked out.)
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