What to Do About Men’s Health
Guest: Kenton Boston, CEO of Canadian Men’s Health Foundation
On this edition of Journal, we focus on the challenges facing boys and men in today’s society.
We know that more women than men make it to post secondary education.
But did you know that men have a 75% greater chance of overdosing on opioids than women?
Men are also three times more likely to commit suicide.
And men don’t tend to take early warning signs of health issues seriously before they become major problems.
Why?
A recently announced federal initiative called “The National Men and Boys’ Health Strategy” provoked the subtitle: It’s time to stop sucking it up and start talking it out.
But long before this recent Canada-wide initiative, which is welcome news, Vancouver’s Dr. Larry Goldenberg was ringing similar alarms. He formed the Canadian Men’s Health Foundation in 2009 with the self-proclaimed mission to stop men from self-destructing and to apply a men’s lens to population health.
He says men don’t want to hear the tired old message of “eat your vegetables, exercise more, and stop smoking.” Instead, he promotes the idea that you don’t have to change much just get started and, in that way, potentially add ten healthy years to your life. It is a holistic approach: physical health, mental health, relationships, and purpose.
17 years later, that Foundation is now headed by Kenton Boston as CEO, and he joins us to look at the various societal pressures and expectations that we are putting on our boys and men that lead to some of these depressing results – and what we can do to change these outcomes, whether it is in prostate cancer or mental health.
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