As soon as I stepped off the elevator at the Cutler Center for Men earlier this summer, I was greeted by a smiling woman with short gray hair in an athletic half-zip top, standing in front of a sign that read, “Welcome Guys.” Past check-in, there were pool tables and foosball tables and two giant-screen televisions showing replays from the N.B.A. finals between the Thunder and the Pacers. A small cafe, decorated with vintage album covers and a classic arcade game, offered flavored water and coffee. At the far end, in what staff members referred to as a Zen corner, with a wall of living moss, nature scenes were displayed on a screen while soft, calming music drifted in. The entire waiting area, encased in glass, looked out over a football field where athletes were going through physical-therapy sessions.
The place was friendly and inviting, but every detail also served a more profound purpose. The Cutler Center is one of the few clinical spaces trying to tackle the stubborn problem of men’s lack of engagement with America’s health care system. The center, which opened its flagship location two years ago at University Hospitals outside Cleveland, has been designed in ways large and small to make men feel welcome — like they’re “a part of ‘Cheers,’” as Lee Ponsky, the chair of urology at University Hospitals and the center’s founder, puts it.
The idea of devoting any extra attention to men’s health can seem “counterintuitive,” Derek M. Griffith, a health-policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading expert on men’s health disparities, acknowledges. “Men are advantaged in so many areas of society. It’s natural to ask, ‘How much should we care that your health is still poor?’” After all, he adds, “we built our whole society with you in mind — so you had your shot there, dude, you won the lottery. And you want us to give you more? Come on.”
But this is exactly what Griffith, along with a growing group of doctors, researchers and advocates, thinks needs to happen. Right now, men in the United States, whether infants or elders, are more likely to die at younger ages than their female counterparts. Male life expectancy at birth is currently 75.8 years — 5.3 years less than it is for women. The gap between American men and women had mostly been narrowing gradually for the first decade of this century, then holding relatively steady, until the Covid-19 pandemic, when it widened sharply to 5.8 years, the largest difference since 1996. While living longer doesn’t guarantee that those extra years are healthy or meaningful, life expectancy remains a rough proxy for overall health.
Over the past several years, men have died at higher rates than women from 14 of the top 15 causes of death. The only exception has been Alzheimer’s disease — and that, at least to some extent, is because more women live long enough to develop it. Young men in particular are heavily affected by deaths of despair, like suicides and overdoses, which significantly lower overall male life expectancy. Native American and Black men have the shortest lives; across all racial groups, men die younger than women.
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The post What Does It Take to Get Men to See a Doctor? appeared first on New York Times.
