It’s a guy thing
Too macho to worry about your health? An emergency room doctor tells Josh Fagan why you shouldn’t be.
Alongside the cases that burst through the doors of the emergency department are the quiet and reluctant arrivals; mostly males who wait to be seen for medical concerns they’ve ignored for too long.
They generally have preventable conditions, Auckland City Hospital emergency doctor Inia Raumati says, and in a lot of cases they haven’t sought medical help but have been brought in by a concerned family member.
‘‘It happens far too often,’’ he says. ‘‘It always amazes me that guys can put up with things for so long. A lot of this stuff is easily treatable if you catch it early.’’
Ahead of Men’s Health Month in June, Raumati is keen to address this ‘‘worrying trend’’.
He has spent the past five years working in the emergency department, dealing with scenes of severe trauma and treating every injury imaginable. But he says he is still surprised by the number of men arriving in emergency for issues that could have been assessed and dealt with in a routine check-up.
‘‘You always see so many men in the emergency department that don’t need to be there. Really, if they’d had good contact with their GPs they wouldn’t have that problem in the first place. They are problems that should have been seen a lot earlier.’’
The symptoms and health concerns vary widely and affect men of all ages and sizes.
There are drastic cases of guys having heart attacks in their 30s, through to complaints involving every different body part.
‘‘You get really bizarre things, guys coming in with late-stage offset testicular problems. And you’re surprised what they put up with, some guys have put up with swollen nuts and stuff for months. You say, ‘This isn’t normal, why haven’t you gone and seen someone?’ And quite often they’re just embarrassed or think it will go away.’’
Raumati says there’s no simple explanation as to why men don’t address their health concerns.
‘‘I don’t know whether they’re shy about stuff or a lot of blokes don’t believe in going to doctors.’’
It’s partly a reluctance to seek treatment and partly down to broader societal expectations, he says.
‘‘There’s all that pressure to get ahead, I think a lot of [men] are spending more time working really hard, trying to do their best for their family and stuff, and not really looking after themselves.
‘‘Stress and depression is getting more prevalent, guys are basically just burning out at young ages. Poor diet, lack of exercise and work stress. If you don’t take some time out for yourself and look after yourself then it’s gonna pay.’’
Ministry of Health figures from 2011 show 3000 men die in New Zealand each year from preventable illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes.
Raumati wants to see a major turnaround in that area, starting with an end to outdated macho attitudes.
‘‘You like to think we’re a lot more liberal and open than what we used to be in the old days. But sometimes even when people come into the hospital it’s hard to dig out what they’re really there for, before someone admits something. We’re lagging behind our female counterparts in that regard.’’
The statistics point to men being considerably worse than women when it comes to health.
Men’s Health Trust research shows men are less likely to visit a GP, less likely to talk to about intimate matters, but more likely to drink or smoke to hazardous levels. And they live an average of four years less than women in New Zealand.
Raumati says men might simply be less familiar with the medical industry.
‘‘Women tie in with the healthcare programme really early, there’s all the screening programmes with breast cancer. It
Stress and depression is getting more prevalent, guys are basically just burning out at young ages.
ties women in with their GPs early.’’
One of the aims of the Men’s Health month is to motivate men to get health checks and to discuss health issues with each other and through the social media hashtag #MenStartTalking.
For his part, Raumati is taking the message of promoting men’s health across New Zealand and around the world on his ultramarathons.
The 41-year-old spends his spare time working on his extreme fitness by running 250km races across deserts and other difficult terrain.
It started as a way to train while he was recovering from a back injury he suffered in a kayak accident in 2010, and has since become his passion.
‘‘You just discover what you’re capable of. If you push yourself and tell yourself you can do it, it’s achievable.’’
He says one of the biggest barriers he’s had to push through was an event in China when his bag didn’t arrive and he had to borrow other people’s clothes and eat other people’s race food that left him so crook that he was hallucinating and vomiting about
Emergency doctor Inia Raumati
230km into the race.
‘‘I just thought I can’t stop there, I’ve got to finish it.’’
He ticked it off and it became one of four ultramarathons he completed in 2014, the first Kiwi ever to do four in one year.
His next challenge is joining the army as a doctor for a year, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, while also planning to get to another ultramarathon event in the United States in August.
But for the next month, he says, he’s pushing for men to talk to each other about their health.
‘‘Typically if you get a group of blokes together and start talking, that gets the ball rolling and makes it more likely then they’ll go and do something about it,’’ he says.
He says in the end, it’s better to get it checked out early and have it treated than end up waiting in the emergency department.
‘‘Probably the main thing is not to be scared about going to a doctor. A lot of my colleagues are very casual. It’s not that sort of scary process any more, of going into a room with some dude with a white coat that’s going to talk down to you. There’s no reason to be afraid of going to the doctor. Even if you are fit and healthy, why not go get a check-up?’’