Ensuring Healthy Futures 
for adolescent and young adult males 

  From
  May 25, 2013


Dennis Barbour examines why adolescents and young men aren't getting the health care they need. 

good men pic

 

 I was a chubby kid. Clothing manufacturers still euphemistically label what had been my size as      "husky". I was chubby, that is, until I was nine. That's the year I visited the pediatrician for the last      time. After he weighed me and poked and prodded my thicker areas he announced with dripping  disdain that at 92 pounds I was ten pounds overweight. He was brutal. He said things to shame me 

 that  to this day make me shiver. But his tactic worked. Within two months I had shed the ten pounds  and  I've been on a diet ever since.

 

 That experience as a child was transformative because it set the stage for a lifetime habit, if not an  obsession, of keeping my weight in check. As I have grown older the logical extension has been 

 regular  cardiovascular exercise, coupled with mild gym rat behavior, which has led to a healthy  examination of  the foods I eat. The fact is, when it comes to health and behavior, lifestyle patterns are  set very early in  life. In my case the stage may have been set for a lifetime obsession when it comes  to my weight and  fitness, but I am thankful that my parents took me to a pediatrician who at least  recognized that I was  on a trajectory to become an overweight, if not obese, adult, with all of the  attendant health consequences.

 

 Today we have an adolescent obesity epidemic in this country, and it isn't just an issue for girls and  young women. We have an adolescent suicide problem, and it's pronounced with adolescent males,  who complete suicide at four times the rate of adolescent females. Homicide among adolescent males  is four times that of adolescent females. Adolescent males have an unintended injury rate that is  double that of females, and adolescent males have an ADHD diagnosis rate that is three times that of  adolescent females. The diagnosis rate of epilepsy among young males is twice that of young females,  and the incidence rates of syphilis among males age 15-24 is from twice to five times that of females.

 

 Yet, like me on that fateful day when I was nine, once most young males leave their pediatrician's office  for the last time they do not return to a health care provider for regular visits until their mid-thirties, if  then. And, while this lack of continuous care may be exacerbated by poverty and other factors, it  affects young men who come from affluent backgrounds as well.  It is often observed that men "do not  go to the doctor" because of misplaced notions of masculinity or because their female partners (as an  extension of their mothers) watch over their health.  It is just as likely that men do not go to the doctor  regularly because by their thirties a visit to the doctor has become a very foreign encounter, fraught with  unpleasant childhood memories....read more........