Men are less used to being probed than women. Probing is a drag. I can understand their reservations, particularly with regard to prostate cancer and the usefulness of the exam on a regular basis. But aside from prostate cancer, they have colon cancer to be concerned with.
My dad put his colonoscopy off for 3 years, and only made an appointment after I told him I’d get mine at the same time. His brother had it and my mom died from it, so we both have a higher risk of getting it. I’m fully convinced he wouldn’t get the exam if I wasn’t going with him. AND getting the exam at the same time.
I would bet the farm that my husband will NEVER get a colonoscopy unless he is exhibiting signs of colon cancer. And even then…he’d probably ignore the symptoms until it was too late. In my experience, older men are much less likely to submit to a probing than younger men.
There are other reasons to go to the gyno. They can catch problems when they start and save you a lot of grief.
At my last exam, the doctor found a yeast infection. I didn’t know I had one (never had one before). She gave me meds for it, and that was that. If I hadn’t found out before it got bad, it could have made me very uncomfortable.
Honestly, I’m glad I have to go to the gyno to get my shot. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.
You need an IUV. A once every 5 plus year poke and prod!
Your average older bloke never had even one poke though. As women we are used to it and try to put up with it as seldom as possible BUT men are subjected to it way less often and because of that find it even more intrusive.
Point in case. I have a nearly 15 yr old son who has never been prodded in the nether regions. At his age my regions had been prodded…several times! Boys have less reason to be prodded until adult age.
Adult men (in my cultue anyway) avoid being examined, to their detriment. Perhaps this is because they don’t have early experience or a way to accept it.
Hey I agree. My own personal banner would read “Stop with the prodding!”. I just have to say two things: In my general experience men avoid doctors and I must be a man (even though I not a man…seriously men DO avoid doctors!)
The female doc as quoted in the OP is the counterpart to the male doc who grouses about women patients constantly running to him with vague abdominal complaints and headaches.
Just treat the sick, practice good preventative medicine and leave your sexist stereotypes at home.
I forgot to add that I was prod-free for over 15 years until recently, so it’s not just a guy thing. I’m doing it now because I’m 50 and I’m told this is the time to start watching for stuff. Hatin’ the prodding.
The recent ads linking HPV and cervical cancer are actually a deterrent to me going to the gyn. I’ve had two normal pap smears and haven’t been sexually active since so I can’t imagine I need any more tests.
If I didn’t have to go in for my antidepressant Rx, I wouldn’t go back at all.
According to the results of the informal poll I recently took: my husband, my brother, my cousins (7 of 11), my husband’s brother, cousins (3 of 4), and father.
The gentlemen who did have that information included my father (who was shamelessly nagged by my mother or would “never have done it”), my husband’s stepfather, three guys who saw a similar commercial (condescending or no, they actually remember the information), two medical health professionals, and a health insurance person.
Granted it’s a stupid commercial, but it’s quite similiar in tone and content to several of the commercials for breast cancer awareness I’ve seen. (“If you were my sister…” indeed.)
And ya, I really hate the poke-n-prod, but I get the feeling I’d hate dying young of a disease that might not have killed me if it were caught earlier a lot more.
I wonder if that’s a generational thing. It takes a lot to get my grandmother, born in 1938, to go to the doctor. She’s a big believer in folk medicine. (Not as a fad, but because she’s used it all her life. The recent popularity of “holistic” remedies simply made supplies easier to come by for her.)
Last year, she sprained her ankle, which she claims to have cured through topical application of turpentine. I did not even try to explain why this was medically impossible. She also claims to have cured a friend of cancer with her aloe-juice, carrot juice and god-knows-what-else, concoction. (That one I didn’t object to, as long as none of the herbs conflicted with his medical treatments.) Coincidence it may be, but the guy who was only given months to live is now cancer-free ten years later.
About ten years ago, I caught lice. I called my grandma, weeping in horror, and was told to come right over and she’d take care of it. She doused me with kerosene and picked the nits from my hair. After I washed it, she combed some sort of oil (I think it was rosemary) through my hair to keep them from coming back. It worked like a charm. (And I’ve heard that lice are becoming immune to Nix and the like.)
Anyway, I’m a modern girl, and I don’t trust vitamins and herbs to cure all of man’s ailments. She occasionally has alarming symptoms like chest pain, but won’t go to the doctor because she doesn’t think it’s necessary. I can’t convince her otherwise.
There was a commercial running awhile back (sponsored by the American Cancer Society, maybe?) about a wife trying to convince her husband to go to the doctor by “staying on his back.” The commercial took this literally, showing the husband going about his daily business (eating breakfast, going to work, visiting the men’s room) as his wife clings limply to his back. I have always hoped that someone would do a modified version of the commercial where the last scene would show the man and his clingy wife entering a divorce attorney’s office.
Y’ah know, pelvic examinations aren’t actually necessary before prescribing contraception. They may be required by your health insurance, or your doctor may routinely like to do them, but they aren’t necessary. In most of europe, if your want birth control you go to your GP, who asks a few questions, takes your blood pressure and Bob’s your uncle. The first pelvic examination most women in the UK or Ireland have is either to confirm their first pregnancy, or for their first smear, depending on which comes first! If someone has normal periods, and she isn’t complaining of any gynaecological symptoms, a pelvic exam is very unlikely to reveal any new information.
A prostate exam, on the other hand, might tell someone an awful lot, since much prostate cancer is symptomless until very late.
Still, women have more awareness that turning up to their doctor early with a problem is better than staying home and pretending it isn’t happening. I have seen very, very few female patients present with late stage cancer (of any kind), yet I have seen several male patients with very, very advanced cancers, simply because they have been too nervous/scared/embarassed to see a doctor, or are in such a state of denial that they only turn up when they’re literally at death’s door.
It was especially noticeable with upper GI cancers- women went to their GPs if they have had difficulty swallowing for more than a day, while some of the male patients waited until they could no longer swallow their own saliva before they showed up, and the male patients with wives seemed to turn up earlier than the single, divorced and widowed men.
I know they’re not medically necessary for birth control, which is what makes me even more pissed off that I can’t find a doctor who will just write me the friggin scrip.
His father died of a sudden MI in his mid-fifties, fell down in his living room dead as a hammer, end of story.
So you would think this would encourage a young man, knowing this, to get himself checked out regularly.
Think again.
When he was 20 his hand got slammed in a car door. He refused to see a doctor, even though I could see exposed tendons.
When he was 22 his nose got broken in a bar fight. He wouldn’t let the emergency room people do more than x-ray and bandage. When he developed breathing problems and sinus pain from this, he shrugged it off.
When he was 25 he had a ruptured appendix. He was in tremendous pain for a week and only went to the ER because my mother threw his ass in the car and he was in too much pain to argue.
Do you see a pattern here?
He smoked. He didn’t watch his diet very carefully. He laughed at exercise. He was a little overweight and drove a computer all day and didn’t think too much about it at all.
He’s dead now. Three weeks ago. All of 51 years old. A heart attack that felled hm like an oak tree. I hope he never knew what hit him, though I also suspect he always knew this day would come, he just didn’t want to deal with any of it, “he didn’t do doctors.”
Guys, girls, everydamnbody, give those who love you a chance to have you around a little longer. Get checked out, take good care of yourself, if not for you for them. I wish he had. It may not have kept this outcome from occuring but it might well have postponed it a little while, at least. I’da taken that.
