Men’s health ‘gets raw deal f rom unis’

Australian universities are ignoring male health issues, despite men being far more at risk of bad health, says a Perth expert.

Associate Professor Allan Huggins, who has set up Australia’s first private academic institute to study men’s health, says he is concerned that men are getting a poor deal when it comes to research.

The psychologist and former senior lecturer at Curtin and Edith Cowan universities is running diploma and post-graduate studies in men’s gender health at the new Fremantle centre.

Courses are aimed at teachers, doctors, nurses and other professionals.

Professor Huggins said it was an indictment of the university sector that no Australian university was teaching men’s health while just about every one of them researched women’s health.

“I don’t have an axe to grind with the work which is done in women’s health but I’m very concerned about the failure of tertiary organisations to recognise men’s health,” he said.

“The reality is that men’s health in Australia is in a very poor state yet we don’t teach it and do not research it in any substantial way. In terms of a cultural thing we have a long way to go before we get a handle on some worrying trends in men’s health.”

Professor Huggins said health problems were much more common in men than women because men took more risks.

They had higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, domestic and other violence, and suicide, particularly among younger men. The average

male life expectancy was still seven to eight years below that for women.

He said that to make matters worse men were 40 per cent less likely than women to visit a doctor.

“This means that not only are they not doing well when it comes to their health, they’re also not coming forward for help,” he said.

The new institute will be adjacent to a men’s counselling clinic in Fremantle and will have a subsidiary office in the Philippines.