Road to hell er, health!

Here’s one aspect of health where men and women feel exactly the same way: each feels the other gender is the bigger hypochondriac, writes Indu Balachandran

I dropped in on my pals Molly and Maddy for material on the gender divide over health. Maddy was looking a bit out-of-sorts so I asked why. “Oh, he has a doctor’s appointment coming up,” said Molly, rolling her eyes upwards. “He found a small bump on his elbow which he is convinced will metastasise itself into a full-blown life-threatening disease by tomorrow…”

“Well what about you making a mountain out of a mole, panicking over it all through our honeymoon, and rushing to your gynaecologist from the airport?” retorted Maddy.

In sickness & in health...

Every day, millions of love-struck couples pledge solemnly that they’ll stick together for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, yet somewhere along the way they fall apart. The reason? They are sick of each other. Yet strangely, instead of going to doctors, they go to lawyers!

Marital ailments apart, I was curious about the genders and obsessions over physical health. We’ve all heard of the rich and famous who made their paranoia public, like Howard Hughes and Andy Warhol. Michael Jackson entertained us with more than songs; with innumerable surgeries that took him from black to white, from god knows, to no nose before he died. But in general, say experts, men don’t do much about new ailments, physical or mental, as much as women do, who seek help more readily. And therefore live longer.

True. All over the world, statistics show that women outlive men. Men try to ignore the odd pain or cramp, perhaps feeling it’s manly to do so. Whereas women talk about it and get things fixed in time. Macho Men go to a hospital when there is a definite medical condition that can’t be ignored like a knife lodged in their back dripping blood. Wary Women detect a faint twinge in their back, fix lunch dates with several ladies at once, talk it all through, note down three alternative chiropractor’s numbers, and visit them all through the following week.

The same goes for mental health. Men in general bottle up feelings, smoke another pack, drink an extra drink to get immediate relief from a grouse or inadequacy in their heads, till they slowly evolve into axing murderers. Women tell their hairdresser, their manicurist, their house help, the stranger in the lift, the passenger in the bus, the dog-walker in the park what a jerk her boyfriend is, and so cure themselves without killing anyone. Including themselves.

Go with your gut

There’s a saying that the road to health is paved with good intestines. So I shall include in this significant research paper, those who go by ‘gut feel’ (though I doubt I’ll get a PhD, making me er, a doctor). These are clever folks who believe in self-diagnosis and self-medication. Why go through expensive medical school, or even a long wait at doctors’ clinics, when you can instantly Google and cure yourself?

Imagine, for instance, you wake up feeling a tiny discomfort under your tongue. In five minutes you can discover that you have a parabolic nodule of the frenulum, leading to lockjaw and permanent loss of speech before your next birthday.

Typically, men will follow a quick-fix tip and place a clove of garlic under their tongue for a day, and forget about it, though a number of annoyed colleagues at the office may not. Women will read all the side effects, which clearly warn that this method could lead to fibrillation and vellication caused by spasticity of tongue muscles, and then research alternative yoga therapies, like keeping the tongue stuck out all day, which may also annoy colleagues in the office.

Despite such modern online ways to diagnose and heal ourselves, medical schools continue to be filled to bursting points, with many men and women easily passing the first exam: bad handwriting skills. How else will they fill prescriptions with illegible words? They’re only helping the pharmaceutical industry survive who make you buy two alternative medicines that are closest in meaning to the doctor’s scrawl, which reads like ‘Sjycgrtocin’, twice before meals.

It’s also the medical industry’s way of getting back at Reader’s Digest which propagated the theory that Laughter is the Best Medicine, rendering their expensive medical education suddenly useless. A reason why doctors hate all forms of humorists. Meanwhile, with so many alternative ways to keep alive, good luck with your health despite all the confusion, whether you are a man or woman; or perhaps confused over that too. And take all that you read here with a pinch of salt, mixed with lemon juice. But do omit the salt if you have high BP!

(He Said/She Said is a monthly column on gender issues — funny side up. The author switched to a career in Advertising/Travel Writing as world markets may have collapsed if she ever became an economist. Reach her at [e-mail])