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 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…
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…
Two patterns show up repeatedly in men who come in about relationships, and on the surface they look like opposites. One man cannot tolerate being alone. He organises his life around a partner's moods, avoids…
A Peace Country summer is short, and the work does not pause for it. Men on rigs, in the trades, on farms and on road crews put in long days in heat that the region…
A layoff. A separation. A diagnosis. A move, a demotion, a death in the family, the end of a rotation that had structured the last eight years. Something changes, and a few weeks later a…
Sexual health screening tends to be treated as a young man's concern. It is offered in a man's twenties, occasionally in his thirties, and then quietly drops off the list — not through any deliberate…
Ask men who have put off getting tested what they were actually avoiding, and the answer is almost never the swab or the needle. It is the conversation. The moment of saying out loud why…
There is a particular frustration in being told that nothing is wrong when something clearly is. Chronic scrotal pain — an ache, a dragging heaviness, or a sharper pain in one or both testicles lasting…
