June is Men’s Health Month: An opinion piece
Alecia Thompson-Branch, MD
June is Men’s Health Month. I would have celebrated the men in my life with a hug, and a gentle reminder to make an appointment to get those essential health screenings that sometimes without encouragement would be delayed or not be performed at all. I would have donned a blue ribbon on my clothing to spark conversation and remind the men that I came into contact with to be mindful of their health and get regular preventative care. I would have recommended routine physical exams including blood pressure checks, cholesterol, diabetes, and electrocardiogram, depression, hepatitis and HIV screening. For men over 50 years old, a rectal exam of the prostate gland and a colonoscopy are recommended and performed even earlier if there is a significant family history or concerning symptoms.1 June is Men’s Health month.
My heart is heavy. Recent weeks have proven challenging. Instead of promoting men’s health with my usual vigor, I find myself enraged and aghast at the video of Amy Cooper in Central Park, breaking the law but having the audacity to use “white privilege” when called to task by a black man who was bird watching, saying “I’m going to tell them an African-American Man is threatening my life.”2 At least she called him a man. I find myself crying unstoppably at the unspeakable image of a black man, his neck being pressed into by the knee of a police officer, crying out “I can’t breathe” for 8 mins and 46 seconds, and then, he lays still.3 Was he too not a man? I’m drawn to the sunglasses casually perched on top of his killer’s head. My Black son asked with concern “Mommy, why are you crying?” Another life lost meaninglessly. June is Men’s Health Month.
As a mother of 2 black sons, and wife to a black man, I was horrified. While these threats to Afro-descended people, especially men, are widely known in the Black community, to witness it in such stark clarity, for the abject racism it was, left me almost bereft of hope that progress had been made since the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s. Had we simply masked the lynchings and the cross burnings with other forms of hurting, isolating and making vulnerable the black community? The short answer is yes. African American men have higher rates of death from heart disease, the number one killer of adults in the US.4 They also have higher rates of arrests and dying under violent circumstances at the hands of police compared to other races.5 It seems a lot to ask for Afro-descended men to worry about diseases and health conditions that may cause them to die in the long term like heart disease, when they are preoccupied with simply surviving their blackness. June is Men’s Health Month.
The list of African-American men to die at the hands of police is not short. Being black portends a higher risk for death for many different diagnoses: heart disease, hypertension, stroke, kidney disease, diabetes, asthma, lung and prostate cancer.6,7,8 The reason for this discrepancy may be multifactorial, related to lower socio-economic status, or otherwise undetermined social or genetic factors. Being black also puts a man at higher risk of death by police. While we campaign to alert men to the need to perform preventative health assessments during this month, we must take the opportunity presented by the recent racially-based occurrences to address other systemic injustices, abuse of “white privilege,” and criminalization of Afro-descended men.9 June is Men’s Health Month.
The outpouring of support for the African American community and the attention drawn to social disparities, like the Civil Rights movement back in the 1960’s, I hope will galvanize multi-cultural collaboration, discussion, policy implementation and subsequently offer long lasting and meaningful change. Everyone has biases, racial or otherwise. However when the biases are racially-based and result in the systematic killing of unarmed Black men by “officers of the law”, open dialogue and change is mandatory. When a white woman feels very comfortable on camera purposefully making false allegations and specifically mentions race as an inciting factor, change must occur. When Miss Cooper herself doesn’t even view the incident as an act of racism, one that could have had potentially disastrous effects and resulted in false arrest, or physical harm at the hands of police, change must come. The psychological impact of being an African American male in a world where your skin color automatically casts suspicion cannot be overlooked. How does one even begin to quantify the degree of stress that this imparts throughout the course of one’s life and account for its impact on health outcomes? June is Men’s Health Month.
The public forum through which these incidents were revealed to the world, hurtful as they may be to watch, was essential in bringing to light what Afro-descended peoples have been experiencing for generations. Through open conversation with our multi-racial colleagues and friends, we can become aware of our own internal biases and force others to give voice to their preconceived notions and explore them; we can permit people to openly speak to their fears; we can have conversation about presumed or real differences and stereotypes among racial, religious and cultural groups. These conversations are essential in order to minimize fear, expand knowledge, and mitigate reliance on stereotypes to inform us of how we act when interacting with a member of another race/cultural/religious group. How do doctors, especially non-Black physicians relate to African American men? How are they engaged in order to build trust? The Tuskegee Syphilis trial is not a figment of our imagination.10 How do you counsel someone about their health when you may have pre-conceived notions about who they are, and perhaps they as the patient has a concern that they will not receive fair and equitable care, that health information is not being divulged or being used for something other than what is stated? With racial and social biases at play how do we form a truly therapeutic alliance that leads to optimal care for a population that is in the highest risk stratification for many diseases? The task ahead is not easy. Let’s talk, let’s learn, let’s advocate. June is Men’s Health Month.
References
1. https://brighamhealthhub.org/prevention/10-essential-health-screenings-for-men
2. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159234/amy-cooper-dog-central-park-police-video.html
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/spotlight/HeartDiseaseSpotlight_2019_0404.pdf
5. https://www.statista.com/chart/21872/map-of-police-violence-against-black-americans/
6. https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aahealth/index.html
7. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/diseases-common-minorities/story?id=14722258
8. https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/African-Americans-and-CKD
9. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-privilege-racism-ibram-x-kendi-robin-diangelo/
10. https://www.tuskegee.edu/about-us/centers-of-excellence/bioethics-center/about-the-usphs-syphilis-study
Alecia Thompson-Branch, MD
