How “Manliness” Can Compromise Your Health

F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE
5 min readOct 29, 2024

A new study shows that men often ignore their own health to their detriment.

When my normally adorable cat Biscuit bit my ankle in a playful stalking exercise gone wrong I washed it with soap and some rubbing alcohol, slapped on a band-aid, and went about my day.

The next morning, when it was swollen, I told myself it was probably just a hematoma and went about my day.

The next day, when the swelling had increased and red lines started creeping up my leg, I called my doctor. Long story short, I ended up hospitalized for intravenous antibiotics.

This is all to say that, yes, I’m sort of an idiot, but also to introduce the idea that maybe I minimized my very obvious lymphangitis because I am a man.

This week — empirical evidence that men downplay their medical symptoms — and that manlier men downplay them even more.

I’m going to talk to you about a study that links manliness, or scientifically speaking “male gender expressivity” to medical diagnoses that are based on hard evidence and medical diagnoses that are based on self-report. I think you see where this is going but I want to walk you through the methods here because it’s fairly interesting.

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F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE
F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE

Written by F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE

Medicine, science, statistics. Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Yale. New book “How Medicine Works and When it Doesn’t” available now.

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