Hi Harry

I was wondering if you could tell me why the government does nothing for male cancers?

Every few weeks there is a news headline on some new break through for fighting breast cancer or ovarian cancer. There is never anything for child or male cancers, and i find this absoloutly disgusting. So much so, that i refuse to donate money to cancer research as i feel it is entirely spent on women. I was always under the impression that men suffered more heart attacks, strokes and cancers than women, which is why i do not understand the endless priority given to breast cancer. There is now a vaccine available for female children which will prevent them from developing ovarian cancer, but there is no similar thing for boys who may develop prostate or testicular cancer when they grow up.

Every time i see a news report about breast cancer, i feel very distressed and as though no one cares about me because i am male. I know this sounds stupid, but i really cant watch anything to do with womens health issues as it makes me extremely angry. Men and boys are suffering and dying needlesly in our own society, and women dont give a sh*t.

L

Hi L

The government in the UK spends about eight times more on women's health than on men's health - and this has been going on for years.

Indeed, the extent to which women hog the resources was revealed again yesterday when a senior consultant was talking excitedly about a new procedure which involves giving a single shot of radiotherapy at the time of surgery - i.e. on the operating table - to women who have developed breast cancer. This new procedure seems to be just as effective as giving conventional radiotherapy after surgery - which typically involves a 5- week course.

"About one-third of all our radiotherapy unit times will be saved if this procedure is found to be successful," he said excitedly.

So, there you have it. One-third of all our radiotherapy resources are used solely to combat women's breast cancer. 

Indeed, there is also a mandate that the health service is obliged to follow which ensures that women are seen by consultants and surgeons within days of any hint that they might have breast cancer. (The equivalent waiting time for other cancers, such as prostate cancer, is commonly measured in months.)

Indeed, I remember a consultant a few years ago admitting that the research into prostate cancer was 20 years behind that of breast cancer because of poor funding.

As a result of his comments, I looked into the government funding of cancer research. And my memory is this.

In 1997/1998, while some £5 million was being spent annually on research to do with breast cancer - and about £10 million was also being spent by government on just one screening programme for breast cancer -  the TOTAL amount of government spending into prostate cancer research was - and you are not going to believe this - £47,000 (in each of those two years) - and, of course, there were/are no screening programmes at all for prostate cancer.

I do not know what the figures are nowadays, but I think that the funding for most research into various cancers has gone up considerably since those days.

A few years ago some MRAs wrote to Cancer Research UK to ask why they were running some kind of charity marathon in order to generate more funding for breast cancer whereas they were not doing anything similar for prostate cancer. The reply was that 'women', themselves, had organised the marathon and that it was their 'idea'.

Well, fair enough, I suppose.

But this does go to show how selfish many women are these days. 

And I think that if men already had most of the cancer budget allocated to their needs, they would deem it unthinkable to run a marathon to generate donations just for their own cancers. They would run to generate money for all kinds of cancer, not just cancers which affected themselves.

Indeed, I ran across a feminist article recently which annoyed me greatly.

Nothing new there!

It claimed that until the feminists came along in the 70s, most of the research into medical ailments was done on men - and that women were therefore 'excluded' from the benefits of such research. The implication of her piece was that women were ignored because they were regarded as 'inferior' and that men, of course, were always cheating them in some way.

The truth, however, was that in those days it was not possible to know if a woman was pregnant - or whether she had become pregnant during any research trials. Determining whether or not a woman was pregnant involved all sorts of medical ins and outs - until, of course, two or three months had passed since conception.

And in order to avoid damaging any young foetuses unknowingly growing within their bodies, women were often excluded from research that involved drug-testing, strenuous exercise, assessing allergic responses, undergoing various diets etc etc.

This was done to protect women and their offspring - not to ignore them.

Furthermore, medicine was not so well-advanced in those days. And doctors did not recognise any major differences between men and women when it came to issues that did not involve the reproductive organs. The assumption was that the bodies of men and women behaved in the same way in most circumstances, and so there was no point in risking damage to future children through research, when researching men would do the job just as well.

Indeed, before anything medical was given, or done, to women, it was first researched on rats, then on monkeys and then on men! 

And it is only recently that doctors have begun to understand that men and women might need to be viewed differently.

And so the feminist nonsense about medical scientists willfully ignoring the bodies of women in order to benefit men is nothing more than the usual pack of lies that feminists commonly tell about 'the past'.

But it is partly because of lies like this, that many women nowadays feel that they are entitled to hog the health budget. It is their way of getting back at men.

Anyway. I seem to have drifted off the subject!

LOL!

But the answer to your question about "why the government does nothing for male cancers?" is given in my recent piece Generating Heat.

Thank you for your email.