It’s a disgrace that Britain treats men’s health so poorly

With humbling candour, MICHAEL PARKINSON talks of his own battle with prostate cancer and, joining the Mail’s campaign, says we need urgent reforms to save thousands of lives

MEN don’t last as long as their wives — that was always the macho attitude among the miners and the machine workers when I was growing up. We live harder and die younger. Get used to it, son.

Heavy drinking, constant smoking and dangerous work — as well as the natural toughness of a woman’s body, which was made for child-bearing . . . all these things meant the men died first.

That’s how it was, at least in my working-class district of Yorkshire in the Fifties and Sixties.

But that attitude seems stupidly outdated today, with the decline of the beer-swilling male culture and the massive leaps in medicine.

Indeed, I’m constantly amazed that this fatalistic outlook persists, even now.

Millions of blokes take the view, without really understanding why they do it, that somehow it is unmanly to look after their own health.

A blood test or a check-up seems unnecessary for any chap who is tough enough to face life and death as a man should.

It’s barmy. It’s pathetic. And it’s killing tens of thousands of British men every year.

I owe my own life to a blood test. It saved me from prostate cancer.

Ever since that lucky escape, five years ago at the age of 78, I have been urging male pals to do what I did — get the test and maybe dodge a bullet. But it’s an uphill struggle.

Even my sons were reluctant to follow my advice. Most other men just wait for me to stop lecturing them, and change the subject.

This is one of the main factors in the increased prevalence of prostate cancer.

It is now a bigger killer than breast cancer, with one man dying every 45 minutes from the disease in the UK.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, compiled by the charity Prostate Cancer UK, show male prostate cancer deaths rose to 11,819 in 2015 (the most recent year for which numbers are available) while breast cancer deaths came down, to 11,442.

We need to celebrate the reduction in female mortality rates — and work out how to achieve the same success with men.

THERE’S

an urgent need for more urological nurses. At the moment, there are 307 in the NHS and each will have to deal with 166 new cases each year — while breast cancer nurses face 86, about half as many.

There’s a simple answer to that: let’s double the number of specialist nurses treating prostate cancer. We know that men have a better chance of a good recovery if a specialist nurse is assigned to their treatment. The statistics prove that. And anyone would have to agree that 300 extra nurses can’t be a bad thing.

A more complicated, but equally essential, method would be to improve the drug treatments. Developing new medicines is hugely expensive, but steady progress is being made.

Two experimental drugs are being tested in the U. S., I understand, that can delay the spread of prostate cancer to other parts of the body by about three years.

They aren’t cheap, of course. One called Xtandi costs about $7,500 (£5,300) a month.

But we need the investment because, according to one of the world’s leading prostate surgeons, Professor Roger Kirby at the University of London, men’s care now lags anything from 10 to 20 years behind that of women.

Making up that gap will cost money — but not an impossible amount. The best estimate says that an extra £290,000 per week pumped into the health service could cover the shortfall. That would not only help put prostate cancer care on a par with that of breast cancer, but in practical terms it could also save the lives of 7,000 men a year.

Still, that’s not going to happen overnight. We blokes have got to do the best we can for ourselves — which starts with the PSA [prostate-specific antigen] test. That’s not going to bankrupt the NHS, at any rate: it’s a simple and low-cost procedure.

So why don’t we do it? One of the biggest factors is that women are less afraid to have their breasts checked, while we fellas are backwards in coming forwards to talk about anything involving our wedding tackle.

Women don’t have the same hang-ups about their bosoms that men have with their own private parts. This is so infantile that it would be funny, if people weren’t dying.

Americans are better about it than us Brits, by the way. In the States, about 70 per cent of men know their PSA score. In the UK, I’d be surprised if even seven per cent can say the same.

Where I come from around Barnsley in South Yorkshire is one of the UK’s blackspots for male cancers — mostly linked to lifestyle factors . . . the booze,

the cigarettes, the fatty foods. The statistics worry me, because Yorkshire means so much to me. The memories of my happy and contented childhood there have sustained me throughout my long life, and I want to know that the place is in good health, in every sense.

Luckily for me, I’ve long been in the habit of having a general checkup. The PSA blood test, which measures the level of a protein called prostate specific antigen, is one of the regular procedures involved.

It’s not infallible, but it’s a good indicator, an early warning that further tests might be necessary.

Only one in four men with raised PSA will actually have prostate cancer, but if the level keeps going up, that’s a warning sign. And that’s why it’s so important to check your score.

My PSA levels had been raised for about three years, when my GP, Jeremy Wheeler, decided it was time to take action and recommended further tests and an MRI scan — the surest way of identifying prostate cancer. This led to a course of radiotherapy.

The first thing my consultant said was: ‘I promise this cancer isn’t going to kill you.’ It had been spotted early and it wasn’t an aggressive strain.

I tried to laugh it off, telling him he was right, and the cancer wouldn’t kill me — because I’m so decrepit that something else was bound to get me first. But secretly I was very relieved that I was getting treatment, and equally afraid of what that treatment would involve.

As it turned out, there was little to fear.

Chemotherapy wasn’t needed, and I will always be grateful for that. Radiotherapy didn’t hurt: it was just boring to lie on my side every day for six weeks and get zapped with invisible waves.

The ordeal was worse for my wife, Mary. We’ve been married for nearly 60 years and it’s a relationship we’ve both come to take somewhat for granted, I suppose.

The discovery of a life-threatening illness came as a shock for both of us, and it was tougher for her because I, at least, could feel that I was doing something practical about it.

AT

the beginning of the treatment, I felt the same nerves that I’d known before every TV appearance — the sense that something could go wrong, the fear of the unknown. By the end, though, I had convinced myself that I’d escaped scot-free . . . and of course, I hadn’t.

The prostate gland is right next to the bladder. It’s inevitable that six weeks of intensive radiotherapy will have side effects in neighbouring tissue, but I wish the specialists had spelled out more clearly to me the likelihood that I’d suffer incontinence. Knowing about it in advance would not have affected my physical symptoms, but it would have helped me to adapt mentally.

These days, I accept the aftermath of the treatment as one of the penalties for growing old. So is erectile dysfunction, which, frankly, hasn’t been a huge inconvenience at 83.

In my 40s and 50s, these problems would have felt far more serious. I don’t know how well I would have coped. But as I keep reminding myself, it’s a lot better than the alternative, which is being dead.

The difficulty is that many men feel instinctively that there must be a third way.

They don’t want to die from cancer, of course. But they don’t fancy facing up to it either. So they take the middle way, and ignore it — blocking out the knowledge that an untreated cancer isn’t going to cure itself.

By the time they do steel themselves to take action, it may be too late. Perhaps it would help if more male celebrities talked about their experiences, but I can’t blame them for guarding their privacy. There’s still a taboo about discussing our genitals: no man feels comfortable admitting that he’s had difficulties down there. That doesn’t apply to women. Thanks to the good sense and courage of many female stars, discussion of all sorts of breast treatments, beginning with a regular self-examination for lumps, is open and normal. That has saved countless lives.

And the exemplary bravery of actress Angelina Jolie, who has been fearless in talking about her double mastectomy, puts the shyness of traditional macho males to shame.

Still, it would be wrong to criticise anyone for keeping quiet about their prostate treatment.

The public arena has become a cruel place, far more abusive and disrespectful than it was when I was interviewing stars on TV every week. Social media can be brutal. No one should be made to run that gauntlet unless they are fully prepared for the consequences.

And it would be wrong, too, if we imagined that the only factor behind the rise in the number of prostate cancer deaths is male reticence.

Breast cancer research and treatment is far better funded, and that imbalance must be corrected urgently, with much more investment in diagnoses for men.

Because the PSA test is far from 100 per cent accurate, we need more effective scanner clinics.

EVERY

woman expects to have access to a regular mammogram if she wants it. A similar option isn’t available to men, with only about half the hospitals in Britain offering MRI scans for prostate checks. This is an injustice, and it has to be set right.

It’s a sad indictment of our society that men’s lives are apparently placed so low on the scale.

That’s why I’m delighted to back the Mail’s magnificent campaign to bring funding for prostate cancer checks into line with that of breast cancer and help save 7,000 lives a year.

It’s not just us blokes being reluctant to get ourselves examined — there are far-reaching problems with under-funding, treatment and the whole medical infrastructure.

Prostate cancer isn’t some mysterious condition baffling doctors. It’s very well understood, and treatment is improving all the time — though not fast enough.

And it isn’t anything to be ashamed of either.

The cure is not emasculation, and it shouldn’t make normal, rugged chaps feel threatened. The majority of cases can be dealt with, leaving very few side-effects.

The initial test takes no more than a few minutes. It isn’t invasive, it doesn’t hurt.

Surely that brief examination is worthwhile if it saves your life.

On current trends, prostate cancer is the third most deadly form, behind lung and bowel cancers. Within five years, it will have the highest fatality rate of all.

But that isn’t inevitable. Every man in Britain has the power to do something about it.

Prostate cancer doesn’t have to kill you if you have the courage to tackle it now. A FEE for this article has been donated to Prostate Cancer UK.