Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Black-male life-expectancy: Where is the leverage?

What if it were possible to remediate every cause of death in the first twenty-five years of the lives of Black males such that their death-rates matched that of White females. Surely that would make a HUGE difference in the life expectancy of those males!

Conversely, what if it were possible to do the same thing but on the other end of the life expectancy. That is, what if we could remediate every cause of death in the LAST 25 years of the lives of Black man such that their death-rates matched that of White women. Would that make much of a difference?

Well, I just happen to know a guy who is decent at extracting data and manipulating spread-sheets. If you use "median life-span" (the age at which half of the population is still alive) as the definition of "life expectancy" then the current life expectancy of Black males is approximately 73 years of age. The life expectancy of White females is approximately 83 years of age.

If you swapped in White female death-rates for the first 25 years you will have 98918/100k surviving Black males instead of 96911/100K at age 25. The impact on life-expectancy is to change if from a few months less than 73 years to a few months after 73 years. Not a big deal and not what I expected.

On the other hand, if you swapped in the White female death-rates in the last 25 years (ages 50 onward), the life expectancy changes from 73 (less a few months) to a little bit less than 82 years-of-age. In other words, almost as good as what White women can expect.

What gives?

Should you be cursed with an abnormal amount of curiosity, you might deep-dive into the causes-of-death for 50-to-75 year-old, Black men.

Top 15 causes-of-death for Black men between the ages of 50 and 75.
My apologize for how busy the graphic is. Causes-of-death are in the first column and those that share similar root-causes share the same color; i.e., vascular related causes are pink, blood-pressure involved causes are purple and infections are blue. In the second column, the death-rate column, I used a green background to identify the causes that I thought were fairly responsive to medical intervention and changes in life-style.

It is not my intention to blame the victims. My youngest son is a Black man in his mid-twenties. If my youngest daughter has children, then all of the boys will be Black males. I have a dog in this fight.

So, I am going to float the hypothesis that the disintegration of the Black family resulted in Black men having less access to medical intervention. Furthermore, due to a multitude of social issues, Black men are very cynical about the motives of the medical industry and highly unlikely to make the life-style changes needed to increase their life expectancy.

To support the hypothesis I just proposed, I will grudgingly volunteer that I wouldn't even HAVE a personal care physician without my wife. She found one and did most of the leg-work. Also, there have been several times when the only reason that I sought professional help was because she kicked me in the dupa. Who kicks the un-familied Black man in the dupa to get him to have a doctor investigate the causes of his bloody stools, shortness of breath or bloody-nose?

That is over-and-above the dearth of medical people who practice in THAT part of town. Doctors want an office in Okemos, Livonia or East Grand Rapids, not the Kingsley Court neighborhood of Lansing, Hamtramck or Wyoming, Michigan.

SO, if there was ONE thing that could be changed to materially increase the life expectancy of Black males, it would not involve violent deaths at an early age. It would involve PUSHING the message that heart-disease often presents different symptoms in Black men than it does in White men and seeking professional help EARLY is a very big deal. We can all have a hearty belly-laugh if it is indigestion from eating too much barbecue. But if it is a heart attack and you don't seek help, we won't be laughing at your funeral.

1 comment:

  1. And blacks are less prone to actually have primary care, but depend on the ER when they have an 'issue'. And that is the only medical care they get.

    ReplyDelete

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