Posted on 10/15/2002 8:22:44 AM PDT by RogerFGay
Congress Sends a Message: Men's Health Doesn't CountOctober 14, 2002
by Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks
The disturbing health and mortality disparities between American whites and blacks are well known, but most people do not realize that the health and mortality disparities between women and men are just as great. For example, the gap in life expectancy between whites and blacks is six years, while the gender gap is 5.7 years. Adjusted for age, men are 1.6 times as likely as women to die from one of the top 10 causes of death, and blacks are 1.5 times as likely to die from them as whites.
Despite this, it is women's health, not men's, which continues to receive government attention and funding. For example, the National Institutes of Health--the federal focal point for medical research in the U.S.--spends nearly four times as much on female-specific health research as on male-specific research. And though the average man is as likely to die from prostate cancer as the average woman is from breast cancer, the Department of Health and Human Services' National Cancer Institute spends three and a half times as much money on breast cancer research as on prostate cancer research.
In fact, prostate cancer makes up 37% of all cancer cases but receives only 5% of federal research funding. In addition, the breast cancer postage stamp has raised over $25 million for breast cancer research since it began in 1998, while a 1999 bill proposing a similar stamp for prostate cancer research was unsuccessful.
When Congress formed the Office on Women's Health in 1991, its goal was to improve women's health by directing and coordinating women's health research, health care services, and health education. Since then men's health advocates have been trying to create an Office of Men's Health, with the goal of duplicating the OWH's success. Yet while a new bill which will help to make the OWH's funding permanent was just passed by the House, the Men's Health Act of 2001 (H.R. 632) remains trapped in the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on health. If not rescued soon, the bill will die when the 107th Congress adjourns this fall.
According to Tracie Snitker, director of public affairs for the Men's Health Network, "the number and quality of federally funded women's health education projects is outstanding. But while outreach programs teach women about breast cancer and cervical cancer, there are few if any programs which educate men about their own gender-specific health needs.
"We want to do for men what the OWH has done for women," she adds. "Men need education about the cancers which disproportionately affect them, such as prostate cancer, skin cancer and colorectal cancer. Young men need education on testicular cancer. Most importantly, we need to teach men to seek preventative health care."
Part of the reason an Office of Men's Health has been so long in coming is the common but nonetheless false perception that the government and the scientific community have paid more attention to men's health than to women's. In 1990 Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) made national headlines by citing the fact that women-specific health research comprised only 14% of the budget of the National Institute of Health (NIH). She called it "blatant discrimination" and led the successful campaign for the creation of the OWH. What Mikulski and many in the media who publicized Mikulski's claims did not understand was that only 6.5% of the NIH's budget went to male-specific research--the vast majority of the NIH's research was gender neutral.
Today the disparity in favor of women in NIH research has grown, as has the gender disparity in enrollments in non-gender-specific studies. According to the Government Accounting Office, one of the few areas where men comprise the majority of research subjects is in initial trials of experimental drugs. These are the trials undertaken to ensure that the drugs are not lethal or seriously harmful.
First, drugs are usually tested on rats and monkeys. If there are no adverse effects, they are then tested on people--usually men. If the men also show no adverse effects, the drugs advance to larger trials, where women comprise the majority.
Considering Congress' repeated refusal to act to help men's health, one can't help but wonder--is men's health as important as women's, or is it merely more important than monkeys'?
Dianna Thompson is the executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and is a nationally recognized expert on families, stepfamilies, divorce, and child custody.
Dianna has made dozens of local and national television appearances, including the NBC Today Show, CNN, Fox News Live, Montel Williams, and Court TV. She has also made hundreds of radio appearances, including on National Public Radio, Radio America, Talk America, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Dennis Prager Show, the Lionel Show, the Bill Handel Show, the Jason Lewis Show, and the Tom Leykis Show.
Dianna's work has appeared, or has been quoted in, hundreds of major newspapers and magazines, including Time Magazine, Redbook, Jane Magazine, the ABA Journal, Playboy, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Times, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Insight magazine, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newark Star Ledger, the Christian Science Monitor, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Sacramento Bee, the Tulsa World, the Houston Chronicle, the Orange County Register, the Seattle Times, and the Associated Press.
Her work has also appeared, or has been quoted on, hundreds of websites including ABCNews.com, CBSnews.com, CNN.com, WorldNetDaily.com, Newsmax.com, RushLimbaugh.com, Foxnews.com, MSNBC.com, Salon.com, Townhall.com, JewishWorldReview.com, GOPUSA.com, iFeminists.com, CatholicExchange.com, CybercastNewsService.com, Yahoo.com, and MensNewsDaily.com.
Glenn Sacks is the only regularly published male columnist in the US who writes about gender issues from a perspective unapologetically sympathetic to men and fathers. Glenn's columns have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Sacramento Bee, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Insight magazine, the Washington Times, and dozens of others. www.GlennJSacks.com.
I feel quite comfortable that my life expectancy is as good or better than any woman my age. One's health is one's own responsibility, not the government's.
There's a reason the networks do that and it's called "the profit motive." Women tend to have, on average, a great deal more interest in health-related topix than men - an interest that the major pharmaceutical companies would like to exploit. Further, there are far more health issues for women in the 25-54 demographic than for men, and that's precisely the demographic the networks strive to deliver.
Enter "the adjacency." NBC's marketing plan is the best of the lot, but ABC and See-BS do it, too.
Almost every night, NBC does a segment called "Lifeline." These are canned, undated pieces by medical correspondent Robert Bazell (which Brokaw pronounces "bra-zell") that have little timeliness other than the fact that they are all "fairly recent." Bazell has dozens in the can, and they're doing more all the time.
The net runs this feature every night so that 25-54 Women will get used to it and perhaps tune in for it. With this ready audience, NBC's Network Sales Department then goes to all the ad agency media buyers and says, "Hey, we've got this segment we run every night about health issues, primarily WOMEN'S health. Your pharmaceutical advertisers can buy adjacencies for such-and-such a premium. That way, their spots will run right next to the Lifeline segment."
And the pharmos bite, because that's right where they want to be. If you'll watch NBC's Nightly News, you'll see most of their drug-company spots runnning on either side of a Lifeline segment...and NBC has turned this segment into a real moneymaker.
THAT'S why you see all the women's health stories on the news. Female viewers say they want to see them, and the network is only too happy to provide this audience to its advertisers.
Capitalism.
Michael
Either women are the most pathetically unfit physical creatures on this planet, or this is a transparent attempt to create another dependent class of constituents for the liberals.
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