How a haircut can be good for your health
01/09/22 .
Blog
Guest blogger David Winskill has a little something that may save your life.
I’m one of those chaps who trots into the barber looking like James May then leaves about an hour later, beautifully coiffured, rather like an older Jeremy Hunt.
The time it takes to hack through my thatch is an opportunity for my barber Rez Misiri and I to chat about all sorts of things and for him to reassure me that I still have a ‘fine head of hair’ and ‘all men thin a little during hot weather’.
At my last shearing we got onto the question of Men’s Important Stuff. After the obligatory ‘It now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night’ gags, we compared notes on enlarged prostates, nocturnal trips to the lavatory and the relative merits of the PSA Test versus the, how shall I put this?, more traditional finger method.
Leaky bladders and other symptoms
When the giggling had subsided, Rez said that lots of his customers chat about leaky bladders and other symptoms and how he’d like to know more. He also mentioned something that I kind of knew but hearing it from someone else really got me thinking: barbers’ shops are brilliant places to get men’s health information out to men.
Now, Prostate Cancer UK have a brilliant little wallet-size fold-out leaflet with all the gen and so I promised to get hold of one for him. He said to get him a few and he’d leave them in the waiting area next to the copies of Stuff and Wired.
I called PCUK and, while speaking to the amazingly helpful Lily, had a light bulb moment. Crouch End, where I live in north London, has at least half a dozen barber shops: why not get the guide into all of them?
Every barber in the area
Lily agreed to send 150 copies (they’re free) and three days later they turned up. It took me less than an hour to get round to all of the men’s hairdressers in my area, find the manager and had over a stash of twenty-five leaflets (pre-bundled and elastic banded).
The response from the shops was fantastic. They all echoed Rez’s comment that the prostate is a regular topic of conversation and all were delighted that they now had something they could give to customers.
So, another call to Lily and another 150 ordered. I’ll be dropping these off in early September when blokes are returning from holiday and popping in for their back-to-work trims.
Now, who do I call about all those other men’s health issues out there? Of course, the Men’s Health Forum.
- Retired PR consultant David Winskill is an associate of the Men’s Health Forum.
- Read our FAQs on the Prostate.
- You can also find all the Forum’s resources including loads of free stuff in our shop.
- You can find our friends at Prostate Cancer UK.
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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