Men's Health Movement?

We're mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore:

In recent years, women's health has been a national priority. Pink ribbons warn of breast cancer. Pins shaped like red dresses raise awareness about heart disease. Offices of women's health have sprung up at every level of government to offer information and free screenings, and one of the largest government studies on hormones and diet in aging focused entirely on older women.

Yet statistics show that men are more likely than women to suffer an early death.

Now some advocates and medical scientists are beginning to ask a question that in some circles might be considered politically incorrect: Is men's health getting short shrift?

Um, no...Oh wait, you're serious.

The idea, they say, is not to denigrate the importance of women's health but to focus public attention on the ways in which men may be uniquely at risk -- and on what a growing men's health movement has termed the "health disparity" between the sexes and its most glaring example, a persistent longevity gap that has narrowed but still shortchanges men of five years of life compared with women.

"We've got men dying at higher rates of just about every disease, and we don't know why," said Dr. Demetrius J. Porche, an associate dean at Louisiana State University's Health Sciences Center School of Nursing in New Orleans, and the editor of a new quarterly, American Journal of Men's Health, that will publish its first issue next March.

The Men's Health Network, a not-for-profit educational foundation based in Washington, has called for creating a federal office of men's health to mirror the office on women's health within the Health and Human Services Department, and it is backing a bill sponsored by Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho, and Representative Vito Fossella, Republican of New York, to do so. Several federal offices on women's health were recently established to compensate for years in which women were often excluded from medical research, but there is no federal office of men's health.

The question here is whether you believe that men have higher mortality rates because of something intrinsically biological -- some evolutionary effect that trades high fertility for mortality deficits -- or something environmental. It is probably both. Men have a tendency to be more aggressive and to have higher amounts of activity -- two things that predispose to early death. Men also have on average poorer diets and smoke more -- although women are closing the smoking gap.

So is men's health getting short shrift? In spite of the fact that I can't give you a straight answer to the question above, my answer is still no. We cannot entirely explain why men die quicker, but we are certainly working on it. Furthermore, men historically have been the medically normative group -- the blank human -- on which most medical and pharmaceutical trials are performed. Women were always viewed as more complicated, requiring more interpretation of the data because of their evil estrogens and child creating abilities, and hence to be only studied secondarily.