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April
The Key to a Man's Health - A Woman
Every physician remembers a few experiences where a
patient’s recovery, a new treatment, or a
startling insight from research challenges and
changes the shape of the medical world. In
pediatrics, for example, the amazing ability of
many babies to restore themselves to health after
devastating illness or injury gives doctors hope
for the treatment of every infant. And more
generally in medicine, the profound insights of
modern science into the genetic origins of disease
and the molecular physiology of illness have
altered our very notion of longevity, not to say of
the value of our work in elevating the quality of
our patients’ lives.
For a pediatrician like me in an academic
institution where children with grave and chronic
conditions are brought for care, there is also the
privilege of keeping one’s eyes open, not just
in the office and at the bedside but in the
elevator and in the waiting room. On my way to my
sixth-floor clinic over the course of thirty years,
stopping at the floors for the orthopedics,
ophthalmology, ear, nose, and throat, and cardiac
clinics, I observed holding close to nearly every
child, no matter how awkward the gait, crossed the
eyes, disfigured the face, or blue the skin, a
mother whose touch, gaze, and voice gave comfort
and the assurance of protection in that strange
place. Certainly there were fathers in the
environment, and not a few were engaged with their
kids. More often, however, they too were being held
by the hand and gave every impression of expecting
similar love and consolation even as they, too,
were being steered to the right office.
The lessons here, of the power of a
mother’s love and how children can capture our
hearts from the moment they appear in our lives,
were powerful for me, the more so because my
responsibility, once I alighted on the sixth floor,
was to preside over a clinic where children, and
their parents, were referred by other doctors,
family service agencies, and courts for evaluations
of concerns about child abuse and domestic
violence. Here things had gone terribly awry, these
loving relationships rent apart by excesses of
power, impulse, and rage, with males doing most of
the damage. And not just to their loved ones, to
themselves as well. Sometimes, their lifelines to
partners and offspring nearly completely severed,
they became even more dangerous, to the
children’s mothers especially. We started a
battered women’s advocacy program in this
clinic in 1986 when for the first time we
appreciated the risks. It was in this setting that
I was inspired to write my own book about boys and
men, one that has never been written, despite its
memorable title: “Bad Men – And How to
Avoid Them.” Perhaps it is just as well.
We males are curious creatures. From infancy, we
are preoccupied with locating ourselves in the
pecking order. Our rough and tumble play,
risk-taking, and passionate pursuit of winning the
game of life set us up for injury, rejection, and
isolation. The poet Anais Nin asked in The
Four-Chambered Heart, “Why do men live on
shoals?” As we grow up, our struggle to find
and define ourselves pitches us in and out of jobs,
relationships, and marriages. It’s hard for us
to stay the course; far more of those fathers in
the elevator on the way to the sixth floor seek
divorce, for example, than fathers of children in
good health. We men live shorter lives, not least
because we don’t take care of ourselves. With
reason, it is said that few of us really ever grow
up.
Recently, a manuscript came across my desk that
provoked a burst of insight and reshaped my
doctor’s world in a way that compared to any
clinical experience in my 38 year career. A
physician-journalist for the CBS television
network, Emily Senay, discovered, from her unique
perspective as a discerning connoisseur of medical
science, as well as daughter, spouse, and mother,
that not only do most men remain boys at heart, but
that the keys to their health and survival are held
by women. In one volume, From Boys to Men,
Dr. Senay assembled a compendium of information
that turns on its head all previous notions of
where the real power resides and who conducts the
most important interventions to advance the health
of boys and men.
Surely it is time that these women -- mothers,
sisters, partners, daughters -- are given the
respect they deserve, serious attention to their
questions and concerns and focused transmissions of
the knowledge they need. In pediatrics, one of the
lessons learned from the American experience with
malpractice suits, is that when you don’t
attend carefully to a mother’s observations
and concerns, your patient – and you –
may be in for serious trouble.
More generally in medicine, I believe, we can
enlarge our perspective, and include our male
patients’ life-giving female connections as we
address the recent and past medical history and
design their programs of treatment,
The aphorism attributed to Victor Hugo,
“Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time
as come,” bears mention here. Were we doctors
to embrace the women in boys’ and men’s
lives as partners in our efforts to prevent and
treat the illnesses of men, we would magnify our,
and their, salutary power. For it is they, not we,
who are the key to a man’s health.
Reference
Senay, E. From Boys to Men: A Woman’s Guide
to the Health of Husbands, Partners, Sons,
Brothers, and Fathers. New York, Chares
Scribner’s Sons, 2004
©2009, Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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