Almost nobody sets out to become dependent on a benzodiazepine. The prescription usually starts for a good reason — a period of severe anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia after a bereavement, a rough stretch that needed…
A man in his forties reads something his son’s paediatrician gave him, or watches a video his niece sent, and something lands hard. The exhaustion after social events that other people seem to find energising.…
A lot of what men believe about HIV was formed in the 1980s and 1990s and has not been updated since. The picture that comes to mind is a fatal illness, a wasting decline, a…
Being told you have cancer and then being told the plan is to watch it produces a particular kind of unease. It sounds like inaction, or like being placed at the back of a queue.…
It rarely begins as a decision to use drugs. It begins with a fourteen-hour shift, a two-hour drive, a rotation with no real days off, and someone on the crew who has something that makes…
It might have started with a genuine scare — a colleague’s heart attack, a relative’s diagnosis, an abnormal result that turned out to be nothing. Since then a man finds himself checking. He palpates the…
For most of the last several decades syphilis was something Canadian physicians read about rather than diagnosed. That has changed. Rates have climbed substantially across Alberta and elsewhere in the country in recent years, including…
Testicular torsion is one of very few genuine emergencies in urology, and it is defined by time more than by anything else. The spermatic cord twists, the blood supply to the testicle is cut off,…
Cannabis occupies an odd space in the conversation about men's health. It has been legal in Canada for years, it is widely used, and the public discussion still tends to split into two unhelpful camps…
Asked how he is feeling, a man says fine. Pressed, he says he does not know. This is often taken as evasion — by partners, by clinicians, sometimes by the man himself, who assumes he…
