Moses: 'Listen to your body. Talk to Man MOT.'

Wandsworth man Moses was diagnosed last year with cancer.

At first I thought I had a chest infection, which I ignored for the best part of a year. When I started to cough up blood and lose weight I put it down to stress. It got to the point that I stopped noticing the cough.

I finally booked an appointment with my GP who arranged for X-rays. By the time my cancer had been confirmed it had spread. I started treatment immediately. I'm now 35 years old and currently in the second phase of cancer treatment.

My advice would be to listen to your body. The Man MOT is a great way to get some advice and take the first steps in getting any help you may need. 

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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