Posted on: Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Men can live longer, medics say

By Rita Rubin
USA Today

Listen up, guys. You may be stronger than women, but you die, on average, about seven years earlier.

It doesn't have to be that way. Increasingly, research implicates behavior, not biology, for men's shorter life spans. Men are more likely to die violently or accidentally, and they're less likely to seek medical care when they don't feel well.

"Men have been taught to be unresponsive to pain and to symptoms of illness," says Jean Bonhomme, a public-health doctor at Emory University in Atlanta.

Changing men's health behaviors is nearly as tricky as changing their biology. But Bonhomme, founder of the National Black Men's Health network, is part of a growing effort seeking to narrow the survival gap between men and women.

Last week saw two new developments in the emerging men's health movement: the debut of a new peer-reviewed scientific journal, the Journal of Men's Health and Gender, and what sponsors say was the first men's health conference convened in the United States.

Like the conference, the journal's first issue covers a variety of topics, ranging from osteoporosis in men to whether gender influences communication between patients and doctors.

Bonhomme and other supporters of the men's health movement note that what's good for the man is good for the woman.

"I think that gender-blind medicine serves neither men nor women well," says Donna Stewart, chair of women's health at the University of Toronto. Stewart, who wrote the lead editorial in the new journal's first issue, also serves on its editorial board.

Wanda Jones, director of the Office of Women's Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, spoke on the opening panel at the men's health conference, held in Arlington, Va.

"It hurts men as much as it hurts women when we continue to assume that one size fits all," Jones said in an interview.

That will take more than medical research, Jones says. "Beyond the biological, we've got to look at some of the sociological and anthropological bases. The culture of being female is entirely different from the culture of being male."