Men have a place in hospital only if they have a sports injury. They cannot be ill. Are male patients too much of a challenge for a doctor's ego, patience and pride, asks Haydn Shaughnessy
Hospitals, doctors and nurses exist for women who are about to have babies, or have pre-natal or post-natal disorders and complications, and for old people and children.
The best medics in the business are an effusion of sympathy, empathy and caring, a moral pinnacle of our aggressive, acquisitive society. They deserve praise and a pay rise. They are above all - and this is no faint praise - good people. Just don't show them a sick man. They hate him.
Men can have an injury. A knee that needs replacement, a shoulder ravaged by rugby or hurling. To the extent that they resemble heroes with their torn ligaments, gashes and broken bones, to the extent they resemble the shrapnel- wounded of the great wars, men have a place in a hospital. But they can't be ill.
By my early 40s I'd spent the best part of 10 years fighting off a series of illnesses that seemed unstoppable. Gastritis, a haemorrhaging stomach, irritable bowel syndrome, mild asthma, inflammatory problems in the hip, shoulder, eye and spine, pneumonia and unattributable pain anywhere.
One of these pains was in a testicle. A surgeon said he should remove the testicle. "It seems to be twisting. You have a sub-acute tortion." He smiled and said, "God gave you two of them for a reason."
Would a woman ever be treated like this if her breasts were at risk?
That day I walked out disgusted by his attitude. He tried to press the issue by claiming that gangrene might set in and I could be dead within hours. The problem cleared up, not without considerable fear, naturally.
Recently after a botch up in a small operation and the loss of six or seven pints of blood, the surgeon actually laughed before asking: "What have you been doing to yourself?" I mean he laughed.
My explanation for men's reluctance to deal with the medical profession is that doctors can't avoid competing with their male patients. Male potency expresses itself in a number of ways that challenge them (questioning diagnoses, scepticism about the notion of medical necessity, refusing to pay respect until it is earned) and that leads to a situation where, in place of an explanation that puts the onus on the medical profession to deal adequately with male illness, we have numerous ways of saying, no, sick men are to blame.
Healthcare professionals begrudge a patient whose illness is diagnostically elusive and a patient being repeatedly ill lies outside the game plan. It creates illogical happenings.
Several doctors tried to help me resolve a fungal problem. One tested for venereal disease even though I told him my marriage was 100 per cent loyal, another said "learn to live with it". I have been treated repeatedly for helicobacter pylori infection when the bacterium was demonstrably proven not to be there. I've had doctors witnessing my visible agony and saying they can't find anything wrong, as if that in itself is a cure.
In these situations men will challenge doctors to do their job properly. That is the nub of the problem. Doctors resent that challenge.
My psychological response to a despairing situation in which any meal could lead to the emergency room was a mild form of panic. For no discernible reason my body would simulate the symptoms of panic, even if I felt okay, perhaps because I knew there was no help out there.
How many men suffer this debilitating cycle in silence, knowing that shame is the last nail in the coffin, the one aspect of illness that denies them a full comeback, consigning them to a sense of inadequacy? They mask their depression with a strange brand of diffidence that keeps them staring down into their pint while real men have a laugh.
Five years ago I walked into my local health food shop, An Tobairín, in Bandon having joined the army of people seeking alternatives.
Alternative health books had become a kind of comfort food. In the middle of a depressing period they offered hope, but in truth that's all they offered.
"What," I asked Donal the owner who stood in front of a rack of supplements, "should I be taking?"
"Well, I wouldn't take any of that shite," Donal said pointing to the brown-bottled supplements and tinctures around him.
Should I go back to the doctor? But Donal wouldn't touch any of the shite they offer either. And as well as owning the shop he was a conventionally trained pharmacist. He doled out pills all day long.
Food, after all, was my most obvious enemy, the stuff that does the damage day by day. Donal's view was that food is the only sustainable cure.
So began five years of experimenting with food and trying to understand what types of food could cure a body that was agonisingly rebelling against itself.
The human body is a battleground that bacteria and viruses are gradually dominating. Bacteria, viruses and parasites are often content to wait decades before some environmental trigger alerts them to their higher duty to proliferate. In the meantime they doss in our nervous system, nestle in bones, occupy the vast unused portion of the human body, our brains.
One theroy of illnesssays most chronic illness is caused by low intensity inflammation, a kind of lurking heat that causes all kinds of degenerative illness from cancer to heart disease. This theory originated with the discovery of the helicobacter bacterium, the sneaky fellow that nestles into our stomach lining and sends our acid production into gush-mode. The researchers who finally nailed ulcers as a bacterial disease are its main advocates.
The causal sequence is not wholly understood but one version says these bacteria cause a normal inflammatory response that ultimately goes haywire. Any site where a foreign body intrudes in our bodies causes inflammation. The inflammation is the body's way of focusing blood and its fixer army of antibodies on a site where a potential danger lies. Many of these inflammatory sites may exist in our arteries and organs, sites where bacteria play the old prisoner of war game, working hard enough to stay alive, not doing anything to invite attention. Gradually the inflammatory response to all these invasions diminishes the body's immune effectiveness.
Other inflammation-led theories say simply that, for example, we get asthma because stomach acids spill out of the gut into the throat and down the airways. Cancers of the oesophagus are on the increase because we cram so much rubbish in our stomachs and we are constantly regurgitating acids into our gullets and destroying them. Yet another theory says that human blood is finely balanced between acid and alkaline states. The body's natural reaction to blood acidity is to withdraw minerals from our cells to neutralise it, depleting our bodies of their essential constituents.
A variant of this explanation is that the acid waste is deposited in bones, joints and muscles where it corrodes them.
These theories are not at odds. How and where does food fit in?
Next week: How food can fuel recovery.
For a discussion on men and sickness see http://www.irishhealth.com