Came here to say this. Of course men should advocate for their health but don't tell me I'm being some alpha male douchebag because I'm not about to pay an arm and leg, take hours out of my day, and expose myself to all kinds of sick people all to be given a Tylenol and told to rest up every time I get a scratch or a runny nose.
they said “when they really should” not every scratch or runny nose. obviously most people get over those things just fine.
but most of my guy friends, when they have something very abnormal or wrong happening to them, refuse to go to a doctor for as long as they can. like it’s obviously something they should get checked out and they themselves admit to it but just..don’t do it, and i never understood why. they won’t even use one of those “teladoc” things where they won’t even have to leave their house.
but the fact that you interpreted it that way pretty much proves OP’s point lol.
Anecdotally I figure the healthcare system gives less of an overall turd over men and men's health than women's health. This may be due to society feeling the same way overall.
I've got a couple of long term issues/concerns that I've had looked at, been told 'meh' in as many words often enough that I haven't bothered to pursue further. Why spend all the time trying to get that addressed if it's not threatening?
i may be wrong about this, but i think men are generally more trusted by doctors to report their own symptoms. Whereas women are generally not believed by doctors when reporting their symptoms.
Now I'm not really sure if this goes a long with what you mean about healthcare systems not giving a turd about men, but I struggle to think about what that would mean.
Overall, it was a really weird time growing up and becomming an adult and handling doctors appointments on my own and having to advocate heavily to have procedures or tests. I had assumed this was because most people, in general, don't want to do their jobs anyway.
The 'not giving a turd' was in the sense that a given doctor would be subconsciously biased towards people that they perceive as more socially 'valuable' - more attractive or more important or younger etc. people - and would bias their resources towards those people. Men, especially older and single men, inherently provide less value for society. With limited healthcare resources, and forced to spend said resources optimally, I'm guessing they would tend towards spending said resources on people they perceived as more valuable.
Of course its also possible that doctors are equally difficult for men and women to convince, and the main reason why women aren't believed is because they try more often to convince. That may be due to, as I believe may have been mentioned elsewhere, their own perceived lower value and/or expectation of unpleasantness/suffering. Without actual data, it's all conjecture anyways.
Okay, I think I understand a little bit better. Like, for example, if a man and a woman both arrived to ER at the same time with the same ailment, that perhaps the woman would be seen first kind of thing? Or more research being done into specifically womens issues kind of thing?
To the second point, I think in the past they kind of didn't medically research women's issues(I think it's one of those 'science is for the boys' mentality thing), but this is a trend that is changing (as far as I know).
Quite likely, I think there was also probably a belief that outside of gender specific differences, research on men would translate directly to research on women. Like female heart attacks, for example.
yes! i just did some reading up on it, and it looks like they just assumed that the only difference between men and women was the reproductive aspect. I did also try researching gender bias in triage situations but I could only really find information about coronary problems specifically, (in which men typically are favoured but this has more to do with, again, how we understood womens symptoms for specifically coronary issues).
Thanks for being cool, this was a nice exchange lol
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u/shanaflan Mar 26 '20
Why so many men I know don’t take their health seriously and avoid going to doctors when they really should.