Growing divide: Rural men are living shorter, less healthy lives than their urban counterparts | The urban-rural gap in life expectancy and health quality for men nearing retirement age has widened over two decades.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1059124
10 Comments
From the article: Rural men are dying earlier than their urban counterparts, and they’re spending fewer of their later years in good health, according to new research from the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.
Higher rates of smoking, obesity and cardiovascular conditions among rural men are helping fuel a rural-urban divide in illness, and this gap has grown over time, according to the [study published](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jrh.12875) this week in the Journal of Rural Health. The findings suggest that by the time rural men reach age 60, there are limited opportunities to fully address this disparity, and earlier interventions may be needed to prevent it from widening further.
The findings also point to a rising demand for care in rural areas, which will particularly challenge these communities. Rural areas are more likely than urban ones to have shortages of healthcare providers and are aging faster as younger residents move to cities, which further shrinks the supply of potential caregivers.
“Rural populations face a higher prevalence of chronic diseases, which has serious implications for healthy aging,” said lead author Jack Chapel, a postdoctoral scholar at the Schaeffer Center. “With an aging population and fewer physicians available, the burden on rural communities is set to grow, leading to significant challenges in providing care for those who will face more health issues in the future.”
Crazy what happens when you make people poor
Voting for a certain party has consequences…
Cutting taxes, keeping rural taxes ‘low’, deregulating hospitals, etc etc. Cutting rural care funds. Oh well.
It’s kinda crazy. Growing up in the suburbs of a large city, most people around me equated the open space of rural areas with a healthy lifestyle. Urban environments were seen as poor and crime-ridden (and there was a good deal of racism mixed in with those attitudes.) now, situation is kinda reversed. Cities are booming. There is still a lot of urban poverty, but rural life seems much more miserable. Higher rates of gun death (mostly suicide), car death, and chronic diseases like diabetes. What’s worse is that the politicians that represent these areas tend to be Republicans that underfund education, trapping these people to lives where they are left behind.
Friend’s sibling lived in wealthy liberal suburb, got politically pissy & moved to stunningly beautiful huge house in new remote rural upscale politically red community. Calif., it do be that way.
Husband suffers heart attack couple months in: paramedics took HOURS to get there, medivac evac took another hour.
Flown to hospital with cardio-specialist unit — yep you guessed it, right in the community they’d left.
Sold & moved back. They f-g still made money on the deal, ugh. Or so they say…
Let’s also not forget the whole access to medical care thing, too.
When you have to drive an hour to go to the doctor? You’re far more likely to try and “sleep off” things or “self medicate”.
This also fits into a lot of other comments on this thread about income as well. Because going to the doctor often means you now get wiped out.
I see this a lot in Kentucky. My friends from Eastern Kentucky (Appalachia) would always tell me how they would never live in a big city like Louisville or Lexington because of all the crime and blight.
Meanwhile their older relatives are dying of black lung and other preventable diseases and the National Guard is setting up dental clinics to combat the Mountain Dew epidemic.
Not surprising no Dr wants to practice in a town that would harass you for something like the COVID vaccine while simultaneously screeching for Ivermectin. It’s an unfortunate state where political ideologies have impacted health care. It’s exhausting to work for a community that does not trust or believe in your field.Â
Having lived in both incredibly rural areas and the nation’s most dense urban areas, it seems pretty clear that the issue is poverty, not urban vs rural. It looks like the authors controlled for educational attainment alone and the gap was cut in half. Control for income levels and I suspect the gap is very small.
You mean to tell me a decades-long diet of whiskey, bacon, and self-inflicted isolation is bad for you?!