MEN'S HEART DISEASE, TOO, IS SOMETIMES IGNORED...

...AS CBS “60 MINUTES” CORRESPONDENT ED BRADLEY OUGHT TO KNOW

     Male doctors sometimes tell 40-something women who complain of chest pain that they have acid reflux. They may simply give them pills to take, and instruct them to refrain from eating certain foods. But what if the chest pain in some of the women turns out to be caused not by acid reflux but by cardiovascular disease? Women's health advocates then insist that the diagnosis of acid reflux exemplifies the sexist medical neglect that results in more women dying of heart disease than men. (More women do die of heart disease than men, but hardly because of sexism. See Women’s Advocates Ignore the Main Reason More Women Die of Heart Disease Than Men.)

     But what women's health advocates won't say is that men, too, are sometimes neglected in the very same manner.

     An example: On February 8, 2004, Larry King was interviewing "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley, age 62, about pop singer Michael Jackson, when the topic suddenly switched (bear in mind that black men, especially those at Bradley's age, are the group at the greatest risk of heart disease)....

KING: All right, Ed, before we take some more calls, what happened?

BRADLEY: You know, I had some chest pain.

KING: You were overseas.

BRADLEY: Going back a year [ago] -- and actually started here. And I went to see a doctor who told me I had acid reflux and gave me a list of things I should not eat, like all the things I like to eat and gave me some pills. And I took them for a couple weeks and I'm still having the chest pains and I said they're not working. He gave me some other pills and then I went off to the Middle East, near the beginning of the war or just at the beginning of the war. And I'm having these terrible pains at night, not constant, but they would last for three or four minutes and then pass. I was trying to eat earlier in the day. We did a piece in Jordan, went Ito srael to edit in Tel Aviv. And I took a flight home and trying to drink this stuff on the plane that would ease my stomach and I come back and say this is not working. I go to see another doctor who has me sent to someone who gives me an endoscopy where they run a tube down your stomach and look at your stomach. When I came to, he said you don't have acid reflux, this is a heart problem. So I went back to see my doctor and he said, get a stress test. They said, OK, you have angina. And he said, take these nitro tablets and whenever you have the pain put one under your tongue and it will go away, and I did.

And he said, you should probably get an angiogram and a second opinion. I went to New Orleans for Jazz Fest, the end of April, came back Sunday night was going back for the second weekend of Jazz Fest on Wednesday. I went for the second opinion on Monday at the hospital. And Doctor Fooster [phonetic spelling], Valentine Fooster, I'll never forget, gave me an EKG, listened to my heart. He said, do some sit- ups, listened to my heart again.

He said, Mr. Bradley, if you were my brother, I wouldn't let you leave the hospital -- acid reflux here. I said, what do you mean don't leave the hospital? I'm going to New Orleans. He said you need this surgery. We do an angiogram. There were arguments going back and forth between him and my doctor. Finally, he went in and he did an angiogram which leads to an angioplasty. They went in and found an 80 percent blockage of the left main artery and pulled out and said you have to have bypass surgery. So this is, by now, it's about 9:00 at night. So, I was scheduled for bypass, that I guess we started about 6:00/6:30 the next morning.

KING: And you had quintuple. There were five...

BRADLEY: Five. Yes. Yes. They tell you all the things that can go wrong.

KING: Do they?

BRADLEY: You know, and then -- I remember when I woke up and I looked around and said to myself, did I have a stroke? Which is one of the things that can go wrong. Did I have a heart attack? And I'm looking around the room and I looked this way and I saw Patricia and she said nothing happened, you're fine. You know, it's just like, ahh, I started to talk.

KING: You think about it a lot now.

BRADLEY: You never get away from it.

KING: No.

(See transcript.)

     Black men who are Ed Bradley's age, 62, are at a greater risk of heart disease than any other group. Doctors know that. So you'd think Bradley's doctor wouldn't have wanted to take any chances -- indeed, the doctor's alarm bells should have gone off full blast -- when Bradley, a member of the highest-risk group (and a famous one with clout!) came in with a complaint of chest pain. Yet the good doctor did take a chance...twice.

     Question: Why didn't women's health advocates point to this as an example of how men, too, are medically neglected on occasion, rather than ignore it and continue complaining about the "sexist neglect" of 40-something women with chest pain?

     Answer: Because many women's health advocates -- especially ideological feminists -- look upon men the way the Old South's bigoted whites in the pre-'60s era looked upon blacks: as a group that deserves to be neglected, medically and otherwise.

tags: mens heart disease neglected  heart disease in black men  ed bradley  larry king  

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