BODY:Are Black Men Afraid of Doctors?

Doctor's Tools
Originally uploaded by Dave Ward Photography

“Why don’t you guys get checkups?”

That was a question a female friend posed to me the other evening while having drinks. She just couldn’t understand why her boyfriend constantly puts off going to the doctor.

“He’s always complaining about this ache, or this pain, yet he won’t go to the doctor to have it checked out,” she said between sips of wine, the frustration clear in her tone.

Several of my male friends said they don’t go to the doctor because they are afraid that the doc might find something wrong. Then there is the attitude-- “Hell, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But how do you know it ain’t broke?


Hey, we black men aren’t alone when it comes from shying away from the doctors office. According to a recent survey by Men's Health magazine and CNN, one-third of American men have not had a checkup in the past year. Nine million men haven't seen a doctor in the last five years.

An American Medical Association study in 1990 found that men, regardless of their race, don't go to the doctor because of fear, denial, embarrassment and threatened masculinity.

* Each year, men make 150 million fewer trips to doctors than women (the disparity occurs in every age group, not just the years some women have prenatal checkups.) p
* One in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, yet few will have the easy and painless digital rectal exam and prostate specific antigen blood test to detect it (women, facing similar odds of breast cancer, are much more likely to examine their breasts regularly and have a mammogram).
* Men are at greater risk of stress-related illnesses than women, yet only 20 percent of the people in the typical stress-management program are men. Men are 30 percent more likely than women to have a stroke.
* One out of three male strokes occur before age 65. Each year, over 50,000 men die of emphysema, one of the most preventable diseases. It has been estimated that more than 3 million men are walking around with early type II diabetes, a disease with major complications, and don't know it.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone bemoan the fact that they didn’t see a doctor earlier–“Doc, said if the problem had been detected earlier, my chance would be better.”

We black men have bought into that macho myth, maybe more so than other groups. We were told to “suck it up and be a man”; “roll with the punches”; “take it like a man”; and, worst of all–“Boy, those better not be no tears I’m seeing.”

Everything we hear tells us that to be a man is to be bulletproof.

Well, guess what–You ain’t no Superman.

It usually takes no more than 20 minutes to get a basic physical–less than a half-hour for a physician to declare you healthy or detect potential problems.