‘why women live longer than men’. I am not a doctor, nor have I
trained in any area of medicine. what follows is a summary of my
research on this subject and applies mainly to the UK.
It is well known that in virtually every country, women live longer
than men. Not by a little but by perhaps 8-10 years, although in
Britain, recent figures show the gap is reducing.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=881
So-called ‘premature deaths’ also have a wide gender difference -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/h…ion/html/4.stm
So why is this? Are women tougher/stronger/less susceptible to illness
etc or is discrimination at work here as well? I will argue that
institutional discrimination throughout the health system is the root
cause, magnifying any perceived differences, if any, in biological
‘toughness’.
1) Suicide
The media keep repeating ‘non-stories’ such as this -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6196716.stm women in afghan
But fail to mention the much bigger problem of male suicides.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/mens_hea…_suicide.shtml
Since the 1980s the number of women committing suicide in the UK has
halved, but the number of men committing suicide has increased by ten
per cent. Suicide is now the most common cause of death in men aged
under 35.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5082616.stm in japan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womansho…6_24_tue.shtml
According to the World Health Organisation, China is one of the few
countries where more women kill themselves than men.
So, of course, WHO are concentrating their efforts on female suicide
in China, rather than tackle suicide elsewhere in the world.
According to Bob Geldof (pictured on this page), the number one day
for suicides in Christmas Day, the number two day is Father’s Day.
I would argue that as a result of feminist teachings over the years,
men are told that they should be ‘tough’ and ‘not cry’. Men find it
difficult to talk about their emotions. men tend to have smaller
social circles and tend not to discuss personal issues, problems or
other ‘weaknesses’ with male colleagues. All of these factors make it
far less likely that men will discuss the problems, and rather that
they bottle them up inside. The inevitable explosion leads to all
kinds of mental illnesses and suicide is the final straw. Men in the
UK are not prone to suicide bombings, but tend to believe they are the
only ones going through their problem. Father’s groups in the UK are
badly attended and have low membership numbers, in spite of large
numbers of victims. There are 2.7million people on Incapacity Benefit
and only 1 million on unemployment benefit in the UK. Incapacity
benefit is paid out to (mainly men) who are incapable of working for a
variety of reasons. many are mental. I have seen fathers destroyed by
family breakdown ending up in mental breakdown. Around 60 suicides
specifically said that the Child Support Agency had driven them to
kill themselves (see earlier article). Needless to say the Government
is trying to reduce the number of people on Incapacity benefit,
believing they are mainly ’scroungers’. The Government is also cutting
back mental health expenditure and releasing more and more mentally
unstable patients into the community. Many of these untreated or
under-treated men are likely to kill or attack others through
inability to control their actions.
2) Dangerous Jobs
Another obvious reason for premature deaths is death in the course of
your work. Men are far more likely to be employed in dangerous jobs -
army, air force, navy, mining, shipbuilding, oil exploration,
steeple-climbing, road-building, construction and heavy engineering.
these are all extremely dangerous jobs and largely male industry – not
through discrimination, but personal choice. As a result, far more men
die at work than women. even in the military which has to practice
so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in practice the women are given ’safe
jobs’ and the men are on the front-line’ How many men have been killed
in the pointless invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? In any country
where war has been happening for many years, there is a chronic
shortage of men.
For example in Chechnya -
http://www.jamestown.org/publication…&issue_id=3880
Polygamy is back on the agenda. This is a symptom of the huge numbers
of men dying in war.
In fact, one controversial argument in favour of the war by the
feminists is to ‘mop up’ the huge numbers of surplus single men who
have no chance of getting a partner, and may be ‘dangerous’ to the
women (attack/rape etc) if allowed to ‘roam the streets’ with high
‘testosterone’ and no outlet.
3) Driving
The UK has a relatively low rate of road deaths by EU
standards.http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBAS….asp?vlnk=7254
This equates to about 3200 per year -
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1208#
I would argue that the majority of people dying on the roads are men,
for this reason -Men on average drive more miles per year than women.
Men do most of their driving on motorways, women in towns. Men have
more accidents on average, but are safer drivers overall as they have
less accidents per kilometre driven, which is the only sensible way of
measuring ’safe’ driving. The feminist media, such as Diamond
insurance, claim that women are safer drivers as the have less
accidents. Whilst it is true that they have less accidents, this is
because they drive less miles. My 11 year old son has never had a
driving accident. According to the feminists he is a safer driver than
me, who has driven 500,000 miles and had one accident. Which of us
would you prefer at the wheel with you as a passenger?
Since accidents in town are generally at low speed, there is less
chance of a fatality. Motorway accidents tend to be high speed and
hence more likely to kill the participants. I would therefore argue
that the majority of accidents on the roads kill men not women.
Additionally, since the media is obsessed with women’s problems, i
suspect this issue would be higher up the agenda if more women died.
As anyone who studies the media will observe, it it doesn’t affect
women it ain’t news.
3) Sickness.
Men are taught from an early age to be ‘tough’ and not to complain. It
is a sign of weakness to be sick. As a result, men are far less likely
to visit a doctor for medical advice than women. Additionally, women
in child-rearing stages are regularly in contact with the medical
services and hence are more likely and less reluctant to ask about
‘this pain that won’t go away’. A man is literally more likely to be
at death’s door before he approaches a doctor. Also since men are more
likely to be working full time they have more problems in getting time
off to visit a doctor and it is less likely to be paid. As a result,
the five year survival rates for just about every terminal illness,
particularly cancers, are far worse for men than women. In simple
terms, the men approach the medical services much later than women.
early detection is one of the biggest indicators in improving survival
rates.
4) Prevention
I believe that prevention is better than cure. The Government clearly
believes this for women and has introduced mass screening (I would
argue not often enough) for women – regular cervical smear tests and
breast screens. These have had a dramatic reduction in breast and
cervical cancer deaths for women.
Men have nothing. Men die from breast cancer as well, but there is no
screening programme. Men die from prostate cancer, and the screening
is a simple blood test to detect the level of prostatic specific
antigen, PSA – a key indicator of prostate cancer. The arguments
against are complete nonsense – I have attended lectures by senior
specialist surgeons in this field – they said that when diagnosed with
prostate cancer, they have three choices – cut it out, radiation
therapy or ‘wait and see’. the third option means monitoring the PSA
regularly to see if it jumps dramatically and then doing one of the
other two! This is because so-called benign prostate cancer affects
many elderly men and can be ‘left’ rather than treated. It is normally
identified by slowly rising PSA. Whilst ‘active’ cancer is indicated
by rapidly rising PSA. For this reason I would argue that we should
ALL have regular (every 6-12 months over age of 40) PSA blood tests
(pinprick) and then we can do our own ‘wait and see’. Whilst the
‘absolute’ PSA level may vary between men, the rate of change is the
indicator of ’something’ happening.
I would argue it is gender discrimination and not basic science that
is preventing the introduction of mass PSA screening for men.
4) Alcohol, drugs and cigarettes.
All of these are extremely dangerous. http://www.roycastle.org/patient/facts.htm
Lung cancer is still the number one cause of death for men. The number
one cause of lung cancer is smoking or passive smoking. You shorten
your life by the amount of time you spend smoking. As men have
realised the dangers of smoking, they have begun to cut-back. One of
the ’successes’ of feminism is that women are now enthusiastically
taking up all the ‘bad’ habits that were originally restricted to me -
smoking, drinking alcohol, drugs to extreme. As a result, the number
of women dying from lung cancer and other smoking related diseases is
increasing, the number of men dying is decreasing. This is the main
reason for the reduction in the gap in life expectancy between the
genders.
Summary – If we had a fair Government (which we don’t) and if men and
women were considered equally important by the Government (which they
are not), then if the aim was to increase every one’s life expectancy
by spending money on research into healthy living, disease causes,
preventive techniques and screening, you would have thought that they
would target the group that had the LOWEST life expectancy first,
wouldn’t you?
In fact, over 90% of Government funding for the medical services in
the UK is spent on services that are wholly or largely devoted to
women’s health.
That is my explanation for the discrimination in life expectancy in
this country.
I discovered the following additional discrimination recently -
General Practitioner (GP).
The GP is the ‘gateway’ to the National health Service (NHS). Other
than attending the Accident and Emergency ward of a hospital, the
normal way in to access health services is through a GP.
Everyone registers with a GP. I have now discovered that you are only
allowed to register with one GP surgery. This must be where you live,
not where you work.
Since most GP’s surgeries (like most facilities and services in the
UK) are only open Monday to Friday 9 -6, they are not accessible by
the majority of people who work full-time without taking time off
work. Since disproportionately more women work part-time, and hence
more men work full-time, it is disproportionately more difficult for a
man to access GP’s surgeries and hence NHS services than a woman. This
is another reason why men are more reluctant to ask for health help
and hence have a poorer service as a result of accessing later than
women. Since men pay more tax and NHI which is used to fund the
service (although women are more likely to receive free prescriptions
for medicines than men) it is unfair that they receive less service
than the women.
I discovered myself that even though I work virtually next door to a
GP’s surgery, they refuse to treat me as I am registered at home (90km
away). They said they would give me an appointment, but ‘only in an
emergency’! What about prevention being better than cure? How do I
know if it is an emergency?
Tags: discrimination, gender, Health, human rights, men, NHS, UK, women
