Ed Cara
12/12/17
Every December, for about the last 30 years according to the New York Times, the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal) publishes a batch of studies and papers that sound way more fun than the typical science fare.
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Another paper claims to have found evidence of the “man-flu”—the phenomenon of men turning into deflated balloons and becoming sicker than women the moment they feel the sniffles coming on.
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they’re also not meant to be taken so seriously, as even the BMJ admits, noting that it welcomes submissions to their Christmas issue that are “light-hearted fare and satire,” but not outright spoofs or fabrications.
As Gizmodo has pointed out before, though, these joke articles get harder to laugh at every year. Not just because of the political hellscape we live in, where our president and his cronies have spent the last year systematically undermining virtually every scientific institution supported by the government, but also because of how sloppy the media tends to be when covering these papers.
The man flu paper in particular has led to a chorus of media headlines and articles proclaiming with a straight face that “new research” shows that the man flu is real, and credulously quoting the paper’s author, Kyle Sue, a Canadian family doctor, as he advocated for “male-friendly spaces, equipped with enormous televisions and reclining chairs, to be set up where men can recover from the debilitating effects of man flu in safety and comfort.”
Sue’s paper isn’t a new study though, the kind where we imagine lab coats shuffling around the lab testing mice and men. It’s just a review of some interesting research, in both animals and humans, that suggests men generally have weaker immune systems than women and offers some reasons why. The reasons range from plausible—testosterone and estrogen could weaken and strengthen the immune system, respectively—to seemingly tongue-in-cheek:
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Update: We heard back from Dr. Sue, who insists his research is legit.
“The research is all real, despite the humorous lens it’s being examined through,” he told Gizmodo. “The comments I make about ‘man caves’, etc. are meant to be tongue-in-cheek, to get a laugh out of a common stereotype. In fact, I think both women and men could benefit from recovering in a safe, warm, comfortable place when ill!”
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“This topic has the potential to strongly affect humankind,” said Sue. “If there indeed is a difference in immune systems between men and women, does that mean we should be dosing vaccines differently? What about medications?”
Men are way over represented in scientific research already.
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