Twelve years ago, Fred Adams was stretched thin. At 36, parenting and running his own law practice in Winston-Salem left little time for much else. As a result, Adams skipped exercise, ate what he wanted and lost count of the routine checkups he’d been putting off. It took a medical emergency for him to finally change course.
Adams was experiencing terrible headaches and nausea, but figured the discomfort would eventually subside. But his wife, April, wasn’t about to wait any longer. When she urged Adams to go in for tests, scans revealed that he had suffered a stroke without ever knowing it.
“I was scared to death,” remembered Adams, 48, who today serves as a judge. “I didn’t have the typical symptoms — no slurred speech, no loss of movement. But I had been doing everything wrong.”
A family history of stroke and diabetes had contributed to Adams’s vertebral artery dissection (a tear in an artery in the neck), a common stroke cause in people younger than 45.
High blood pressure, obesity and neglecting exercise are also among the factors that can cause strokes. They affect about 800,000 people in the U.S. each year, with African Americans almost twice as likely as white patients to have a first stroke, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Good health starts with a visit to a primary care physician.
The masculinity problem
For most men, the excuses mount with age: a growing family, a hectic career, a distrust of medicine. But putting health last by delaying routine health checkups and screenings can often lead to a shorter life.
Men of color are especially reluctant to book medical appointments, said Dr. John Card, Adams’s primary care physician at Novant Health Adult Primary Care Harper Hill.
Why wait? Because society’s “masculinity norms” tend to feed male reluctance when it comes to seeking medical attention including preventive care; racial discrimination exacerbates this resistance among men of color.
“We sometimes fight an uphill battle when it comes to prescribing medication to our African American patients,” Card said. “It’s a feeling of not wanting to feel inferior. Whenever we’re ailing or told that something’s wrong with us, we feel we’re not that super-person we believe ourselves to be.”
Adams: “I don’t know if I was skeptical or whether it was a case of me not prioritizing my health. My thinking was, ‘I’ll get to it when I get to it, or when the pain gets so bad that I can’t bear it.’”