Il Regno Unito avrà una strategia per la salute degli uomini, annuncia il governo

“Nothing frustrates me more than when men’s health and women’s health are somehow pitted in opposition to each other, as if by focusing on a men’s health strategy we are in any way detracting from the brilliant work that successive governments have been doing on women’s health and actually much more work we need to do,” he added.”

Took some time to realise it. Well, let’s see what actions will follow…

This is certainly a good direction to take, and I’m curious to see the actual details once they are released. I also – genuinely – don’t think that having these sex-specific strategies in place is a zero-sum game.

What really bothers me here though is the reporting:

>This will transform the lives of men but also their wives, mothers, sisters, partners, mates, neighbours, children, teachers and doctors.

Imagine the line “this will transform the lives of women but also their husbands, fathers, brothers, partners […]”.

And then the entire bottom paragraph:

>The UK’s women’s health strategy, external, published in 2022, under the Conservative government, says: “Although women in the UK on average live longer than men, women spend a significantly greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability when compared with men.

>”Not enough focus is placed on women-specific issues like miscarriage or menopause, and women are under-represented when it comes to important clinical trials.”

Why? This is an article about a men’s health strategy. None of this adds to the message, and the entire “women spent greater proportion in ill health” is incredibly confounded by average lifespan (to the point of being misleading; I’d argue this statement is not true in the sense that it is intended to be).

A bit more nitpicky, but – the arguable highlight in the article is the prevalence of suicide in men under 50, and the main image is a bald, slightly overweight man in his, what, 60s, doing awkard stretching in the park?

I’d have expected this from some of the lower media outlets; coming from the BBC, this is nothing short of embarassing.