It’s been a while since I sat down to write our magazine’s opening gambit, and to be honest, it has been a struggle. What’s changed in men’s health over those 11 and a half years when I began?
When I look back at editions past of this annual men’s issue, subjects such as PSA reliability, men’s tardiness to deal with health issues, concussion, domestic violence, work-life balance are perennial favourites.
So, yes, it’s definitely a Back to the Future moment with some of these important issues returning yet again in Men’s health 2023.
However, we are blessed that technology and collective knowledge has created more precision diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer – read on, it is a ray of sunshine (p41, p42) and new guidelines (p20) will hopefully make it easier for GPs to guide their patients more securely on this confronting path.
There are a lot of health issues to lay men low, not the least of them around issues that challenge their mental health and wellbeing. Is this changing?
Round x – so many rounds – of the concussion story (p24) sees CTE come out of the shadows and clinicians able to make some educated ‘premortum’ assumptions of who has it and how they developed it. There is still enormous work to be done here in sporting codes which may be too influenced by the rewards of putting on a gladiatorial spectacle than a fair and safe game, but the docs and researchers are on their tails.
There are a lot of health issues to lay men low, not the least of them around issues that challenge their mental health and wellbeing. Is this changing?
I’d like to think so, if based on nothing but the evidence within my own large, male-heavy family. Watching as this circus ages, a remarkably different tone is being struck by the younger generation, particularly around work and wellbeing.
Perhaps watching their elders completely at a loss in their retirement, or delaying health red flags, and relying on the Emu to lift flagging spirits, these younger men are taking a new road.
They have life-affirming experiences beyond a job in which they have negotiated adequate flexibility to accommodate being an integral part of their young families’ lives, and have time left over to care for their own health and wellbeing.
This should be celebrated and encouraged but still somehow their endeavours are often judged unreasonably.
Mutual respect – recognising the importance of everyone’s contribution to the working whole as well accepting individual needs – is essential and it will pay out in spades for future generations. What a world that could be!