Disease-a-Month 60 (2014) 137

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Disease-a-Month journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/disamonth

Foreword

I was first introduced to the topic of men's health in my role as an adjunct faculty at Portland State University (PSU). I was asked if I could teach a course on men's health to undergraduate students for the PSU School of Community Health. Having a background in family medicine, I was confident that I could develop the course and teach it at the undergraduate level. As a first step, I decided to search the internet for course syllabi used by other schools to teach courses in men's health. To my surprise, while I could find my course outlines for women's health, I found few on men's health. Next, I looked for textbooks, and again I found several on women's health but few texts devoted to men's health. Like most physicians, I tend to think of gender and medicine as being an issue more relevant to women than men. In doing research for teaching men's health, I was somewhat surprised to see how large a gap there is in the health of men and women. I hope that the articles in this issue will bring a greater awareness to the disparities faced by men and make a compelling argument that being male is a determinant of health and that gender influences health. An accompanying article by Lemieux et al. discusses the issue of suicide, which has a predominance of 4:1 male to female ratio. The final piece by Saman is a good review of prostate cancer screening and highlights the rationale behind the USPSTF decision to recommend against routine PSA screening. The value of having a greater appreciation of men's health is not limited to men. If we fail to keep men healthy, it creates a burden on their families and society. For example, widowed women are far more likely to live in poverty than married women are, and children with healthy fathers do better in school. Finally, new work on epigenetics suggests that good health behaviors in men affect even unborn children. My hope is that this issue brings attention to an area of medicine that is frequently overlooked.

Martin S. Lipsky, MD, MS Editor

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.disamonth.2014.02.005 0011-5029 & 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Foreword.

Foreword. - PDF Download Free
98KB Sizes 2 Downloads 3 Views

Recommend Documents