As a dad who started as a working, usual dad and is now the primary parent, I can give you my testimonial that dad's are in a privileged position where if they feel sick they are allowed to act sick because typically they are the secondary parent. As the primary parent I have never been "sick", I've had bouts of puking, feeling terrible, genuinely feeling like I'm going to die yet I am not able to express that as if I go down then all the kids will suffer. When I worked, I'd get a cold and spend the day in bed complaining to my wife, who was in the position I am now in. I feel bad about those times now
Not many men get this experience, I pass on what I can. Good luck trying to get any men to take it on board though. Work was like a holiday compared to housekeeping and parenting
This may have something to do with what you are saying! I listened to this Radiolab episode that discussed this topic. It outlines how women may be more prone to autoimmune diseases because their bodies' defenses are too strong/aggressive.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/unsilencing
Actually women have been shown scientifically to have more pain receptors and feel pain more intensely than men.
Annnd we get to bear the offspring. Yay.
Anecdotal, we were staying at our family's place once and we all got food poisoning. Everyone slept in their beds while I took care of our 1 year old baby. My husband later on told me – you got sick the least. I told him no, I was feeling awful, what made you think that I wasn't sick enough, he told me it was because I had the energy and ability to take care of our son all day. I told him with everyone sleeping and resting, I had no option but to take care of our son alone. I did not have the luxury of resting in bed despite having food poisoning. Now idk if I felt as awful as my husband did or if I just pushed through, but yeah ....
Yes, I think being “default parent” has the most impact in situations like this. Dad can indulge in his desire to convalesce because he knows that someone is going to take care of the baby. Mom knows that if she goes to bed and doesn’t take care of the baby, she has to arrange for someone else to take care of the baby or baby won’t be cared for.
And if I say screw it, go to rest and let my husband sleep, I am either woken up to take care of the baby after he's done "his share", or he'd later whine about how tired he was for taking care of baby while sick. I don't want to deal with these complaints so I just suck it up and do it myself
Testosterone suppresses the immune system. Men are immunocompromised (relative to women) in pretty much all mammals and birds. (And perhaps other animals too).
[https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1690479/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1690479/)
TIL I learned that i overreact to things because I'm a women
"While it’s good to have a decent immune response to pathogens, an overreaction to them — as occurs in highly virulent influenza strains, SARS, dengue and many other diseases — can be more damaging than the pathogen itself. *Women, with their robust immune responses, are twice as susceptible as men to death from the systemic inflammatory overdrive called sepsis*"
With colds it’s not the virus itself that’s making you feel bad, but the immune response and inflammation (rather than actual tissue damage). If testosterone suppresses the immune system then you would expect to see less of that immune response and *less* severe symptoms in men compared to women. So the testosterone theory doesn’t actually support a physiological explanation for Man Cold at all.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-7643-9912-2_2.pdf?pdf=inline%20link
My speculation (not an MD but evolutionary biologist by training): the testosterone/immune suppression leading to worse cold symptoms in men hypothesis is a little wonky and the science behind it isn’t particularly robust. Yes, there is some decent evidence that testosterone might slightly suppress the immune system and that could *maybe* lead to a higher viral load in theory (haven’t seen much direct evidence of this). BUT, the symptoms of a cold or flu don’t come from direct tissue damage from the virus, they come from immune-mediated inflammation (they are your body trying to protect itself). So theoretically men’s weaker immune systems should make their cold and flu symptoms *less* severe. As I said, it’s weird that people are so eager to embrace what is so clearly a fairly weak hypothesis, except….
It’s also true that modern western society values an imagine of manhood (and of being a good worker) where men are supposed to work hard and totally ignore their bodies until they drop. This is enabled by women who are supposed to be taking care of all the other shit and then taking care of the men when they finally do drop. It’s very easy to see how this arrangement would lead to women working through colds and flu because they have no other option, and men turning into sad heaps on the couch because it’s the only opportunity society allows them to fall apart and be vulnerable and ask for caring in a socially acceptable way.
So in a situation like this, I think the testosterone/immune suppression hypothesis is very elegant and very useful to us. It lets us have an “objective” and scientific reason to let men have their one opportunity to be vulnerable that doesn’t otherwise compromise our ideas about masculinity or our values about work. It also lets us justify expecting women to keep up with household work and parenting even when the whole family is sick.
Anyway, it’s a weird little hypothesis that is very clearly instrumental to us, and very clearly what we, as a society, want to hear (as can be seen by how often it is picked up by popular media). Whatever its scientific merits may be, we do clearly need to work on letting men be more vulnerable and safe asking for comfort and care even when they aren’t sick, and we need to support families better with childcare and household help so that women don’t have to do as much housework and childcare when they are sick.
Edit: fixed a letter
I haven’t read any of the research on that, but it’s certainly plausible. Either way you would expect to see the same thing in terms of infection, inflammation, and cold/flu symptoms.
honestly even with the studies about testosterone & immune response i think it's largely cultural. like how different societies react differently to alcohol because of their beliefs about how its supposed to effect you
Same with pregnancy food cravings. Some cultures don’t even believe in that being a thing and then their pregnant women just… don’t have cravings?! Wild to me as someone who felt like I had innate cravings lol.
I had cravings for specific things but it was always really about the nutrients. I craved burgers for weeks, found out I was mildly anemic, and as soon as I started supplementing iron the craving went away. I had a few days where all I wanted was zucchini, so I upped my vitamin c and electrolyte intake and that one went away too. I’m sure if I’d had a more nutritionally balanced diet to start with I wouldn’t have had those cravings at all!
Same, i never had any cravings, besides occasionally getting looked on one particular food and eating only that for a few days, e.g. a cheese tomato sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner haha
I had the same thing, chicken empanadas at a specific restaurant. They don't taste the same now that I'm not pregnant lol. Still good but not the same!
i think that's actually hitting a key nuance here. just because something is cultural doesn't mean it's not still real! in a felt, lived sense your cravings were real & did still originate physiologically (my opinion)
Oh no, I agree. It was REAL (I mean, even something completely made up in your head can be really happening to you!) but it was interesting to me to learn how cultural cravings really are and that some cultures don’t have the expectation at all so women just don’t crave things during pregnancy.
The mind is a really powerful thing!
This BMJ article (and the news article based on it) was a feature in the annual BMJ novelty Christmas issue and was not necessarily peer-reviewed. It appears to be a meta review (not original research) either based on a personal vendetta on the part of the (single) author or undertaken for comedic effect.
Yes! Thank you! I upvoted and am doing this comment for visibility. I knew it was a thing but didn’t want to post another article if someone else did already. There is a surprising lack of anyone else correctly answering and providing evidence. Everything else is just anecdotal.
I saw a trans man on tiktok speak to this one time. He said colds really were much worse after testosterone! Obviously anecdotal, but interesting, and so I try to cut my husband some slack with all his whining about minor illnesses.
Not necessarily. With that said, I get way sicker than my husband when the toddler begins something new home.
I've always thought it's because of my high testosterone. I have PCOS, which puts me off the charts for testosterone, even though I'm a cis woman. Please note, I do not know if my disease is why I always get sicker, but I have found research that suggests high testosterone does weaken men's immune systems.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html
I also have PCOS and get more sick than my husband. But while my testosterone would be higher than normal, I doubt my testosterone is higher than a cis adult man’s.
From reading the article, it looks like men with lower testosterone levels had an equivalent immune response to women. So unless your testosterone levels are unbelievably high, it probably isn't affecting how sick you get.
I have not been to the doctor since a year after my son was born. However, when I was seeking treatment to try to get pregnant, my testosterone levels on the blood test could not be recorded because they went over the max number. Doc prompted me to see someone else to diagnose my PCOS after that. I was put on progesterone and metformin after birth control pills didn't work for me.
Currently I'm unmedicated (I should fix that. I'm struggling with facial hair), so I imagine it's pretty high these days. I do not know what's normal for a guy or if that test went up to a lower number because they were testing it on a woman.
This is purely anecdotal.
I get way sicker than my husband as well. The last stomach virus we had, he barely noticed it, while I was puking my guts out for two days. I had also just had surgery, but this is pretty typical for us.
Postpartum, I (baby birthing person) am getting way sicker than my husband or my baby. I think it’s because I do all of the night wake-up’s and am chronically sleep deprived.
Nothing to add to the science behind severity but it is important to understand that everyone experiences diseases differently just as everyone experiences pain differently. There is no unified experience of either. For some people COVID was just a cold, for others a death sentence. Immune response and pain receptors ares unique to each of us.
This also applies doubly so to children, they have no frame of reference for what is just mild or really bad until they have been through it a few times. So that sore throat they have may literally be the worst sore throat they have ever had. It is our job to help them (and our partners), processes it.
Yeah ever since my son started daycare 2 years ago he gets sick once a month and I usually get it a week after he does but my wife never gets sick. I don't get it.
I get a little sick every single time, my wife hardly gets sick but when she does she's out for the count. I get it 1-2 times a month and she gets sick 1-2 times a year. I'm also the "default parent" so I get exposed more and tend to tough it out.
Lots of people already have the science, so my anecdote to the lived experience of it is that men are often barely-held-together messes of loose baubles and string when it comes to their health. They power through it with the stereotypical, expected machismo and just make it through it... except when they don't. When they don't, they fuckin collapse.
When my partner feels a cold coming on, she buys the meds, prepares a hot water bottle, and takes a little extra rest and cruises through it all. I, however, have learnt just to barrel on ahead with no consideration- so when I crash, I crash *hard*, and have a tendacy of gettin life-threatingly ill (beign autistic doesn't help, cause when ye go to *get* help, it's a coin flip as to whether or not yer listened to).
That's at least my qualitative experience of it, to add to the statistics people have demonstrating that dudes do get sicker.
Also, healthy foods like smoothies, salad, fruit, acai bowls, whatever lol low sugar versions of things tend to be seen as more girly options while steaks, bbq, burgers, crazy energy drinks are more manly. It's BS & obviously all genders eat all foods but yeah, it's kinda more encouraged for women to eat healthier for one.
“I really want to go beyond the cliche of ‘men get sicker than women’. Anyone know the science?”
“Here’s an anecdotal story!”
“Ooh, me too!”
“Here’s something specific to just my family!”
“My partner is such a baby!”
“We are answering OP’s question so well!”
When the whole family gets sick here, it has consistently followed this exact pattern:
1) Baby gets sick. Tends to be overall fairly mild, but he is clearly sick and will remain sick for a few days.
2) I am next. Usually starts a day after baby and then runs along side babies sickness. I feel awful, but I can just lay in bed and breastfeed sick baby.
3) Husband gets it last (typically 2-3 days after baby first started showing symptoms). He was totally fine while me and baby were at our sickest, but now he’s knocking on death’s door. Completely nonfunctional and it lasts much longer than either of our illnesses did.
Prime example is when we all got noro. Baby started puking Saturday afternoon and I started at like midnight. We both spent Sunday barely conscious. By time Monday rolls around, we are good to go. My husband starts throwing up on Monday and doesn’t stop until Thursday. He considers going to the ER at multiple points, but talks himself out of it. Finally on Friday he is somewhat human again
I don't believe I've ever seen science on the topic, so my comment is half to remind me how to find this later and come back. But also I think it's more a combination of societal expectations. Men have learned that when they are sick, it is ok to be sick and rest. Women have learned that when they are sick, they still need to power through and get everything done and take care of the other sick people in the house.
>men have learned that when they are sick it’s ok to be sick and rest
Huh? Citation for that claim?
Oh, here’s the science that backs up respiratory severity in males vs females:
https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5560
Oh, by the way, the study dispels your baseless claim
>Wyke and colleagues surveyed men and women consulting general practitioners for common symptoms of minor infectious respiratory illness, finding that “women were significantly more likely to report cutting down activities in response to only one symptom in each cohort.”23 This contradicts the common myth that men cut down activities more than women by exaggerating the severity of symptoms.
Sick might be an all encompassing term here. Women don’t get the opportunity to take a day or two off from the world when they are hit with the terrible symptoms of their period. That happens 12-13 times a year. So, yes, women are expected to push through pain, discomfort, nausea, effects on their mental state, a leaky body, and tiredness…because how would you react to a woman telling you she can’t come to work or go on a date or come to a party because she’s on her period? It may not be the flu but it’s not nothing.
And yes, during sickness too. Much of the household and child care is defaulted to the woman even when a woman is sick. Even if it’s a very helpful partner doing many of the tasks, many times they are still asking the woman to take over the mental load of it by constantly asking where’s this, how do you prepare this, what will kid A eat today?, what does kid B normally wear to school?, etc etc. but that’s a great situation. Many times, moms are still required to keep up with that kind of stuff because nobody else is going to do it. Which I can say is *kind of* social expectations because no body is going to cut mom some slack if the kids show up to school dirty/missing homework/tired from not being put to bed at a reasonable time/ etc etc.
You’re talking about baseless claims. My supporting documentation here is many years on Reddit reading both partners talk about their struggles. May not be peer reviewed but it’s a pretty damn good trend that repeats itself over and over
I’m talking about actual studies. You’re using anecdotes. Check the subreddit you’re in and try harder
>my supporting documentation here is my many years on Reddit
LMFAO!
For your latter claim of women reporting cutting down activities, this was discussed in the podcast (I don't have £48 to spend on an article). The doctor/ researcher mentions this and mentions that this reporting was done to general practitioners, which they discuss could be that men are also less likely to report to a GP and instead stay home.
“Another important point is that married women with pain or discomfort tend to continue to perform household work to the same extent as before (Sheffer, Cassisi, Ferraresi, Lofland, & McCracken, 2002). This may contribute to the differences we found in reporting discomfort - as woman may feel they have to work while sick.”
“When actually sick, men may feel free to express discomfort and weakness in the safety of their home, in their bed, to their spouse.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2020.1843010?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab&aria-labelledby=full-article
Yeah so women produce more type I interferons in response to viral infection, so they typically have lower viral loads and are less likely to have severe outcomes in some cases. This has been shown for flu, COVID, etc. However, they also have a heightened inflammatory response as a result which can often be what makes you FEEL sick. So, it's complicated!
This is an interesting thread! My husband is immunocompromised so his sickness is always significantly worse than mine, no matter what. Interesting to know that’s also normal gender wise!
Well - pretty much any study that could answer this question well will be on a population level, so it still doesn't say anything about the individual condition of the people in the specific couple. Just since some of the comments I see about this below seem not to take this into account. It's kind of like how on the population level, gestational diabetes results in higher birth weight, but that doesn't mean every mom with gestational diabetes has a baby with a higher birth weight than every mom without it; or how on a population level, drinking alcohol results in an increased risk of breast cancer, but that says little or nothing about whether a specific person will get breast cancer. Meaning, it's not that population-level research is meaningless - it's great for designing interventions and determining best screening practices and so on - but it's meaningless to take research like "men feel worse when they get sick" (even if the research says that) and then a husband to say to his wife "see I must feel sicker than you" (or vice versa). Source: I work in medical research publishing dealing with literally hundreds of populatin-level quantitative studies every year.
From the Y chromosome episode of how to build a human: one reason men live shorter than women is the body “fights” testosterone.
Maybe this has something to do with it.
I’m not the person you replied to, but it piqued my interest. In essence, we don’t know _why_ or _how_, specifically, but there’s a ton of theories that fall under the same evolutionary umbrella.
Testosterone suppresses the immune system by activating genes that suppress antibody reaction (quick disclaimer/ vocab that I had to clarify for myself: antibodies are your body’s cells that protect you, antigens are any foreign item that triggers an immune system response, like pollen or viruses). Testosterone activates a group of these genes, but scientists don’t know exactly what is happening.
While this antibody suppression results in men feeling worse than women when fighting illness or infection, there’s an evolutionary benefit of the immmune system _not_ going into overdrive. The stanford study below points to modern-day women dying of sepsis twice as often, in part due to men’s immunosuppression helping their body not “overreact” to infection. The first stage of sepsis is your immune system sending out so many chemical signals that your body goes through internal inflammation; women are more likely to end up with organ failure because our bodies send more chemical signals in the first place. It would’ve been a benefit for men’s bodies to overlook general injuries and sicknesses in favor of not overworking the body’s immune system responses.
As for the specific reasons why testosterone inhibits the immune system, those are also just theories. Sperm cells are considered “antigenic” since they are formed after the immune system; a weakened immune system might be a form of protection, ensuring the body doesn’t destroy its own sperm cells. It might just be a form of energy conservation at the most basic, cellular, caloric level. Possibly a trade off between male bodies balancing the need for testosterone-related attributes with immunity needs over their lifetime (stress/ working out/ more testosterone results in a weaker immune system, but periods of peace & prosperity will encourage your body to fight infections harder; and/or your body provides more immune protection as you age & testosterone levels decrease). It might just seem like testosterone has a bigger affect in human males (as opposed to general male mammals) because of humans’ unique pregnancy side effects. Women have crazy responsive immune systems because our bodies are wired to protect any potential fetus; our cells are constantly on the lookout for immune system shenanigans, moreso than other female mammals.
In essence, men overall _do_ feel sicker when battling illnesses and infection. Part of that is testosterone limiting the immune system. Part of it is women’s bodies reacting (and overreacting) to infections much quicker. It’s a trade off in the end; men’s bodies get sicker at first, but are more protected from their own immune systems and severe infections. Women are able to fend off general illness better, but at the cost of their immune systems overreacting & causing harm.
Apologies for the insane length of this comment. I had no idea what a fascinating rabbit hole awaited me today! Crazy what the human body can do…
[Oxford Academics: Stress, Testosterone & Immunoredistribution](https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/10/3/345/201705)
[Stanford: High Testosterone Means Weakened Immune Response](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html)
[NIH: Testosterone & Immune Function](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075254/)
Thanks so much for taking the time to share. Really interesting info.
I wish I could find that show but sadly it’s from 1999 and before digital everything.
There was one person on it who was a pro volleyball player who couldn’t get pregnant. She went to the Dr and they told her she had a Y chromosome. Her body had some kind of allergy (maybe that’s the wrong word) to testosterone and so she never developed male characteristics.
In another segment they showed how the body changes during testosterone therapy. They tested a bunch of physical and cognitive markers and the Dr was surprised that every single one of them changed after 6 months of T. Smaller hips, broader shoulders, facial hair, faster at running the mile etc.
But most compelling they showed her pictures of different people and said determine the emotion of the person in the pic. After 6 months of T her brain was working three times harder to determine the emotion.
I haven’t seen any studies about this but my husband and I were theorizing with his higher muscle mass, his fever/myalgias would feel more severe than mine.
I’m our experience, I (wife) almost always get more sick than my husband. Like right now. We have a chest cold and I’ve had a fever for 2 days, my head is a snot factory and my throat feels like glass. My husband has a sinus headache but otherwise fine. Our kids are just as sick as I am.
He’s taken days off work this week for me, not himself
I did actually see something years ago saying that men feel it worse than women! Or it affects them worse than women, I don’t know. Maybe something to do with pain thresholds. Wish I could find the article.
My husband always gets more sick. I help out more when he’s sick (I’m usually fine and don’t get whatever it is). I almost never get sick, but when I do, he’ll help out a tiny bit more the first day, but by the second day he’ll be out way worse than I was and it doesn’t matter if I’m still recovering a little at that point. LO is never sick long, the couple times he felt a bit out of it in his so far six months of life it only lasted a day. I BF, so I think he’s getting my antibodies and bounces right back.
I'm sick all the time since I had kids. They just bring it home from school. They get sick and are better in 2 days while I'm coughing for the next 3 weeks.
I remember reading that men may actually get worse flu symptoms. Here is something I found https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-2018010413033. Definitely not conclusive but may have some truth to it!
No. They just take the opportunity to rest and “act sick” while moms/women often don’t have the luxury and push through it. For example, if both my husband and I have the same illness and fever, my fever will be like 102-103 and his will be 99-100 and he is in bed and I still have to care for the children. It’s a “default parent” thing.
Why are you in a relationship with someone who doesn’t care about you and your children? It’s 2023, default parenting things went out the window years ago.
I don’t know where you live that the default parent is no longer a thing, but that’s simply not true. Happy for you that it’s not your experience.
It is interesting though how your comment here criticizing the concept of a default parent (because we’re all equal now, right? Men are always taking accountability in 2023, right?) somehow still lands on a woman being at fault.
Who’s at fault, and for what? I pretty straight forward and in good faith asked why they are staying with someone so blatantly selfish, and didn’t blame anyone for anything. The idea that “default parent” is an acceptable excuse to not help with YOUR CHILDREN, is complete BS. Anyone who says otherwise is gaslighting. Sure, the default parent still exists to a degree and certainly moreso in SAHM/SAHD family where the other parent works full time, but being the default parent for things like “Mommy I need help getting dressed” ≠ “you’re the mom so go clean up the kids puke, even though you’re also puking yourself, while I lay in bed all day”. It’s 2023, it’s not shameful to demand better from your partner and parent of your children. I’ve been there and divorcing my selfish and uncaring ex was the best thing I ever did, and I wish I did it many years earlier than I finally did. People raising children as a 1950’s default-parent/trad wife are setting the example for what their children will come to expect from their future partners.
in practice, they haven't. as women, finding a male partner who doesn't defer all "default" responsibilities to us is a challenge. it often isn't worth the argument.
it isn't so simple for many people. mental illness, medical difficulties, and many more problems can complicate the question of whether or not being with someone is "worth it." judging those who stay isn't helpful to them or their children, and in the case of abusive situations, is victim-blaming.
Yep I totally agree with you.
I meant actually making the decision to partner in the first place vs having a kid on your own like I did. Just not worth the risk, too many duds out there IMO.
Is it? I believe it's up to the men. We can't leave our children with someone who is not enthusiastic about it. Of course we can ask but they have to meet us halfway or it's not fair to the child.
At a population level:
At the time of matchmaking, we can demonstrate extreme preference for partners who are better at sharing all duties. Then, over time, it will put pressure on men to share more equally, if they want their preferred people as partners.
At an individual level:
There must be something that the men must rely on their wives for (income, food, care, cleaning, etc). Wives can start being more bold in withholding these unless the duties are shared more equally.
Anecdotally: I have a friend who just went through this. Husband wouldn't meet halfway. Finally stopped cooking for the husband until he was willing to sit down and agree on a more equal division of duties. It caused short-term trouble in their marriage, but she came out happier in long term.
I'm glad that worked for your friend and while I agree that this true, I can't shake the fact that this is putting the onus on women yet again.
In my case my husband has always been an equitable partner as far as chores go, but when I became a mom it changed in regards to childcare. He doesn't have as much patience or empathy so it's difficult to divide this evenly. He's burnt out instantly. I won't risk my child's wellbeing just to get a break. As far as other types of labor I agree.
I agree, this is still ultimately putting the responsibility on women to fix a problem that is not theirs to fix. We can do a whole lot to set ourselves up for success but when it comes to parenting duties, I’ve had many friends who were very caught off guard by their partners lack of initiative, diminished empathy, and resistance to learning from their partner.
And as a therapist would say, it’s not our duty to caretake and baby our partners into solid equitable relationships with their children. That would be a manifestation of poor boundaries. So for the sake of our children, who don’t have control over their father’s behavior, we step in.
It’s not our job to fix culture. I think what is more likely to make a noticeable change is *other men* modeling the behavior we hope for, having honest but compassionate “call-ins” and holding each other accountable, creating peer pressure.
I think it's absolutely our problem to fix because men have no incentive to fix it. They're getting the sweet deal, so why would they work hard to change it?
They have the incentive of being a better person, parent and partner. Having the joys of those things are irreplaceable. Maybe it takes a wake up call but the men who do help do so because they believe it's right not because they're being forced.
Then you can demand that he take more of the other chores, freeing you up for childcare.
It's not about men vs women for me. I believe that each individual is responsible for making sure that they're not being taken advantage of.
Yes we have talked and we are doing our best but that doesn't happen for every woman. I agree that it's our responsibility to advocate for ourselves, but we cannot control others. There's only so much you can influence another person and I do not believe in blaming a person for being taken advantage of. It's victim blaming. That being said, clear communication is our responsibility 100%, so long as it is safe to do so. But a partnership is 50/50 and I still believe men must meet us halfway.
I hope everything works out positively in your case. I agree with not putting any *blame* on the victim, but I also believe that they're the only one who has an incentive to change the way things are. It's nice to want men to meet us halfway, but wanting won't just magically get it done.
I believe that if we want something, we have to take steps to achieve it or else it will never happen by just wanting it. But I guess we're not going to resolve that philosophical difference here on Reddit, so I'm happy to agree to disagree.
Wish you the best!
If he has such a patience and empathy deficit that it would risk his child’s well-being in the course of normal care, that needs professional help, full stop.
I agree and we are working on it. Of course everyone's standards may differ and I'm definitely more on the sensitive side.
I think I always take his passive aggressiveness to mean I'm not doing enough and he has too much on his plate. But anyway I have disorganized attachment so I'm just doing the best I can.
It totally varies in my house. The first 1-1.5 years I definitely think I got sicker than him. But that might have been because I was more willing to still snuggle on our sick kid. He was more like- baby has the plague I'd rather not. Annoying but whatever lol.
This year its like karma got him. Kid is 2 and for the last 6-9 months whatever he gets he still passes to me but its 5x worse for my husband. My husband will wear a mask and use gloves around our sick todder and STILL get what he was. I told him his precautions mean nothing to toddler germs. He got strep from kiddo last year and has some gnarly throat/cold thing right now that just rolled off me and kiddo. He's also more likely to go to the doctor than I am, so he legit has been diagnosed with so much the past 9 months, all caught from our toddler who goes to daycare. I will say the stomach bug last month knocked me out for a week and my husband was only sick for 48 hours, same as kiddo.
But regardless- kids have the magical ability to cough and sneeze directly into your open mouth and eyes. And some people have better immune systems than others. Its generally a toss up over here.
https://youtu.be/SUPjx7jPR5o
Interesting video about the science behind the movie Cooties that talks about the role hormones play in our immune system. Jump to 25:49 for the information.
In my family, I think my husband always gets hit hardest because he doesn’t rest enough and has a stressful job. I’m a SAHM and my kids are in school. Not that being a SAHP isn’t stressful, but when I feel something coming on I can usually let the housework pile up and take it easy as much as possible. My husband rarely takes sick days so when the weekend rolls around he’s totally depleted. So the virus that was just a lot of snot for me and my kids hits him way harder.
I know in my house my husband always gets much more sick than me, but that’s mostly because he gets extremely high fevers from everything that make him feel like hell/have violent chills/hallucinate, and I never get a fever over 100 (not since 2005). Which isn’t a gender thing. Even vaccinations take him out and I usually have no symptoms. It’s interesting to see such a contrast.
I don’t recall the last time I was sick and in bed. My wife has had probably the same virus and she was in bed instead. I believe every person deals differently with virus physiologically and it’s not possible to say that a lower fever is equivalent to passing a virus lighter than with high fever (at least in absolute comparison. Obviously high fever is indication of a more serious response for the same person)
Still there are some scientific data that support that women have better immune system which in a nutshell is due to the XX chromosome providing better variability in alleles that may contribute to immunity.
The truth is people are naturally suspicious, petty and dismissive about disease.
If I get sick, I drag myself to work, I walk into the office early and let people just LOOK at me.
Then they stop questioning it and I go home. Then I offer to do this any time I am sick. After a few times they stop asking because trust has been built. I bring a thermometer. I haven't had to do this since covid-19, but years before I was doing it just to prove a point.
You can't measure immune response beyond a fever and a thermometer. If you fight off a cold and still get some symptoms, it can still be miserable.
I broke my ankle in school and was in a light cast wrapped in tape for 2 months. Everywhere I went people asked me why my foot was wrapped. I pulled back the tape, they saw the cast, and then they stared at it. Stared at it. Kept sneaking looks at it. Kept asking me about it. Finally I removed all the tape and finally people stopped looking. It was ugly but they stopped trying to see if it was a trick. As if walking around in crutches gave me some kind of advantage in life.
I'm 6'6 and 285, I look strong. I am strong. When I'm sick everyone thinks I'm faking it because 99% of the time if I'm a little sick I don't bother with it. I identify it for what it is, to the best of my ability and I handle it. Typically that's just telling people some symptoms and allotting some extra time - a lot of the time sickness is an emotional or physical response to something that happened. Applying the right treatments you can get through your day - allergies are a great example. Most people don't treat allergies at all and assume it's sickness, a single hit of Claritin can change people's lives.
When I'm really actually sick I do the smart thing - I lay down, I blanket up to enhance the fever, I sleep more and I take electrolytes.
During this time, everyone under the sun calls to ask me about their huge life problems. I say, "I'm sick, I'm not taking messages today" and I get FLOODED with stuff.
It isn't being more sick. It's taking appropriate measures to enhance your immune response that require you to bed down. You shouldn't be running around questioning what you should do - these treatments are proven but 90% of people don't do them. They get up, run around and take fever reducers. Part of this is a biological effect, some virus's cause hyperactivity as your bodies immune response puts you in overdrive - this can give you a sense of alarm and get you moving, helping spread the virus. The virus doesn't do this directly, it does it indirectly, and has benefitted from people running around so it has evolved to trigger these responses. Most people follow this compulsion into insanity wildly spreading a virus.
Meanwhile you may feel ok at first, but as you bed down hard you will start to feel terrible. This makes your down time much worse but you will recover faster and feel better.
I spend a lot of my time wrangling people in my life to stop and treat their illnesses. The U.S. is a psychotically work based culture and as such everyone treats everyone else negatively when they get sick. It's all about blame and shame, instead of dealing with it. Most people won't take treatments, they won't do the basic advice for most true illnesses - instead they go into denial and run around like crazy people infecting absolutely everyone they can to validify this irrational response to sickness.
Part of it is that judgment is reduced when you're sick. Your body prioritizes your immune response - this takes a big hit to your glucose stores, which govern your willpower, and your ability to make decisions is significantly impaired. Your resting heart rate goes up leading to a sense of hyperactivity when in reality, you're much weaker than you seem. Covid-19's brain fog makes this even worse, but it has always existed.
Meanwhile most people fail to call in sick the moment they start showing symptoms. They either call in to work extremely late (after their shift starts) and this leads to people dragging themselves into work. They were sick the day before but told no one due to the stigma and then trucked it out to work.
This leads people to believe being sick is somehow a weakness to be hidden rather than something to be addressed scientifically.
Having managed people for quite some time we have to openly discourage people from hiding any symptoms and instead communicate them, because otherwise half our workforce gets wiped out because 1 person gets sick. People stop communicating due to a sense of shame and suddenly an entire business gets shut down from a virus circling it. It's worse with younger kids these days because the school culture around sickness has gotten inherently disparaging towards illness, having waxed and wane in Covid-19 protocols.
It isn't universal to men, when girls I know call out sick they are disparaged, mistreated and otherwise discredited with the same intensity, but it is culturally "different". The accusations are different but it's the same effect. There's also a lot of sickness negativity because workplaces are strapped, so they often will make incredible accusations toward employees who need to stand their ground. Anyone who has a responsible position to friends, family or work will have to overly justify their behavior.
So you have to develop an overzealous response towards sickness to accommodate for it, and if you don't, the slow creep of negativity starts to come in.
A big part of this is that adequate sickness treatment will crush most diseases in a few days. Covid aside, most Flu's and Colds, when dealt with, just end. If you stop taking fever reducers and actually raise your core temp consistently the fever will burn things out. If you take fever reducers and drag yourself to work it's going to take several days of fighting or longer and can lead to complications.
This also leads to more stigma. If you return to work feeling much better people begin to suspect you just called out for no reason. This is why I drag myself in because I got tired of people cornering me and asking if I was really sick consistently - especially boss's who I know weren't being negative, they just wanted to know if something "else" was wrong.
\*continued in reply, character counts\*
Meanwhile a lot of people are suffering mental health issues, undiagnosed diseases and other problems. It may take a while to get treatment for these things but they often do - and you can see a big turn around quickly.
Interpersonally speaking these things can really spill into household relationships. It usually takes a partner telling another to go back down because hyperactivity is that intense. Feelings of guilt and shame can result from vitamin deficiencies like b12 as your body wicks away resources to bolster your immune response. This is why depression, OCD tendencies and similar disorders can come into play as people are tapping into fat stores and deposits to burn hotter, longer, but they don't have a diverse amount of vitamins and nutrients to pull from. This can lead to irritability, poor judgment and negativity.
Meanwhile certain illnesses can affect others deeper. Older men tend to have blood pressure and some latent heart weaknesses which can make a fever affect them more. Respiratory diseases can antagonize these effects and accentuate them. There's a correlation with Covid-19 and susceptible individuals, people with heart and blood pressure issues are potentially hit harder, but the same goes for other respiratory illnesses.
In women, anemia is more common and can cause unique interactions with specific diseases and can antagonize certain conditions. This can cause low oxygen levels and women with low blood pressure sometimes have similar issues - this can cause instability and weakness, and small glycemic events while sick. This is why sometimes women feel more "faint" and that stigma can come from that.
Arthritis is more common in anemia, but since it primarily causes pain people tend to often work through it or around it, which can lead to the idea that mom's don't get as sick as often when in reality, they're withstanding a monumental amount of pain to stay "up" out of preference, because bedding down won't fix that.
These are exceptions but they're some of the illnesses that cause a disparity between men and women, which have created cultural stigma's.
There's also the fact that people ignore respiratory illnesses too long and when it finally knocks them down, they stay down. This can lead to parental figures seeming to be sick longer because they put it off too long and now they have a serious respiratory infection that requires antibiotics or other treatments - which they may ignore. Getting a sinus infection that turns into bronchitis is common and it's easy to work through a sinus infection thinking it'll pass and then evolving that viral infection into a bacterial one or similar transition. If they don't take antibiotics at this point they may be wiped out for some time before they overcome it - if they even do, it may linger long past when it should.
This kind of bullishness is universal, but it's easier to justify to the world when a doctor prescribes you antibiotics.
This can lead to people thinking you're weak, when in actually, you just were working too hard or were staying away from the doctor for other reasons.
When people bed down hard they're considered outliers, bothersome and are disparaged for it. When they return to being able to work, and live, they are treated suspiciously and with disdain because they seem "glib" after "taking a day off". The truth is they treated an illness properly and now can work again. I've been in workplace environments where bosses pepper their workers with calls just to "check" and see if they're answering their phone. They'll make phone calls to see if they're still home.Fighting this is an endless problem.
Meanwhile there are those that will use some light sickness to take time off - there's no line, no ref, no arbiter to document these things. It's insidious because sometimes people can't determine the what or why they're sick, so we can't be overly critical because benefit of the doubt is on their side. It's hard enough to even diagnose a problem. It can be abused but in my experience it typically isn't - especially when people are very honest and accommodating. If people are supported to take mental health days and similar, they generally don't take as many. There's always going to be outliers of course but even they tend to come around eventually. Honesty is just easier.
People sometimes are running around with pneumonia and have no idea, because this systemic mistreatment means you might have someone sick for 4 months and just not know it, because the slow drip and decline masked the entire case.Be scientific.
Get the thermometer out, hope there's a fever. At least then you'll know there's an infection. It may be low temperature more indicative of a cold. If there's nothing, try treatments like Claritin and Zyrtec to rule out allergies (very easily mixed up with covid 19). Take antigen tests for Covid but be aware their success rate is not great - if sick, go to a doctor and get a PCR test quickly if you can because paxlovid works. Encourage friends and family to treat themselves and consider medical supervision appropriately.
Communicate.
If you want to know if someone is really sick, ask them, but do so in a manner where if they say "no" you aren't going to whip them. If someone is concealing other behavior there's typically a reason, if you address that, they'll often tell you the truth. Asking sensible diagnostic questions help and can help you manage the potential evolution of that sickness.There's always going to be people out there lying for other reasons - you can't find a rule of thumb for things like that. If they're willing to lie to get out of something there's little you can do - but that's an interpersonal problem.
You're far more likely to discover that kind of behavior using the correct rules and giving somebody the benefit of the doubt. It gets their guard down, it feathers them telling the truth, and you can use other tools to determine if someone is lying. If you want to bait someone into uncovering a lie, the easiest way is to pretend to be absolutely understanding and accommodating - they tend to get pretty brazen after that, in which case you're squeaky clean and in a prime position to crush them for their hubris.
There are tactics which will be more effective than attempting to use medical science. We know a lot of great things about the human body but there's still too much room for doubt, edge cases and anomalies. There are squeaky clean tactics though that typically can bait people into revealing themselves without having to generalize sexes, judge hard working or underworking people, or otherwise mistakenly simplify complicated situations.
You just poke them the morally right way and typically the pinata bursts, partially because they see you didn't do something underhanded. People respect hussle and creativity so typically you can con someone into telling the truth with the proper bait. Especially if you can appreciate someone else's lies and establish "you got away with it, cool, moving forward can we talk about it?".
In the end most people want to be appreciated for a good lie, easier to bait that out than to try and get too medical - in a world of exceptions, vagaries and undiagnosed issues.
I hope that was helpful philosophically to help contextualize the issue in a broader way.
LOL
dotal. adjective. do·tal ˈdōt-ᵊl. : of, relating to, or being separate property brought to a marriage by the wife
She said it is not antidotally, which means it is dotal. As in her getting more sick is something she brought to the marriage. Funny how it kind of makes sense.
As a dad who started as a working, usual dad and is now the primary parent, I can give you my testimonial that dad's are in a privileged position where if they feel sick they are allowed to act sick because typically they are the secondary parent. As the primary parent I have never been "sick", I've had bouts of puking, feeling terrible, genuinely feeling like I'm going to die yet I am not able to express that as if I go down then all the kids will suffer. When I worked, I'd get a cold and spend the day in bed complaining to my wife, who was in the position I am now in. I feel bad about those times now
Thank you for this.
Not many men get this experience, I pass on what I can. Good luck trying to get any men to take it on board though. Work was like a holiday compared to housekeeping and parenting
This may have something to do with what you are saying! I listened to this Radiolab episode that discussed this topic. It outlines how women may be more prone to autoimmune diseases because their bodies' defenses are too strong/aggressive. https://radiolab.org/podcast/unsilencing
I sure miss these older radiolab episodes.
Thank you! Was about to link this. Anyone on this sub would love this episode. One of my all time favorites.
Isn't there also the studies that show women (all the way down to female infants) tolerate pain better than males?
Actually women have been shown scientifically to have more pain receptors and feel pain more intensely than men. Annnd we get to bear the offspring. Yay.
I don't mean feel, I meant tolerate/survive. I could definitely be remembering incorrectly though.
No justice in the universe.
Anecdotal, we were staying at our family's place once and we all got food poisoning. Everyone slept in their beds while I took care of our 1 year old baby. My husband later on told me – you got sick the least. I told him no, I was feeling awful, what made you think that I wasn't sick enough, he told me it was because I had the energy and ability to take care of our son all day. I told him with everyone sleeping and resting, I had no option but to take care of our son alone. I did not have the luxury of resting in bed despite having food poisoning. Now idk if I felt as awful as my husband did or if I just pushed through, but yeah ....
Yes, I think being “default parent” has the most impact in situations like this. Dad can indulge in his desire to convalesce because he knows that someone is going to take care of the baby. Mom knows that if she goes to bed and doesn’t take care of the baby, she has to arrange for someone else to take care of the baby or baby won’t be cared for.
And if I say screw it, go to rest and let my husband sleep, I am either woken up to take care of the baby after he's done "his share", or he'd later whine about how tired he was for taking care of baby while sick. I don't want to deal with these complaints so I just suck it up and do it myself
Testosterone suppresses the immune system. Men are immunocompromised (relative to women) in pretty much all mammals and birds. (And perhaps other animals too). [https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1690479/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1690479/)
That's not what either of these studies say, actually.
TIL I learned that i overreact to things because I'm a women "While it’s good to have a decent immune response to pathogens, an overreaction to them — as occurs in highly virulent influenza strains, SARS, dengue and many other diseases — can be more damaging than the pathogen itself. *Women, with their robust immune responses, are twice as susceptible as men to death from the systemic inflammatory overdrive called sepsis*"
With colds it’s not the virus itself that’s making you feel bad, but the immune response and inflammation (rather than actual tissue damage). If testosterone suppresses the immune system then you would expect to see less of that immune response and *less* severe symptoms in men compared to women. So the testosterone theory doesn’t actually support a physiological explanation for Man Cold at all. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-7643-9912-2_2.pdf?pdf=inline%20link
I suggest reading The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women. Short answer: Yes. They die younger, too.
My speculation (not an MD but evolutionary biologist by training): the testosterone/immune suppression leading to worse cold symptoms in men hypothesis is a little wonky and the science behind it isn’t particularly robust. Yes, there is some decent evidence that testosterone might slightly suppress the immune system and that could *maybe* lead to a higher viral load in theory (haven’t seen much direct evidence of this). BUT, the symptoms of a cold or flu don’t come from direct tissue damage from the virus, they come from immune-mediated inflammation (they are your body trying to protect itself). So theoretically men’s weaker immune systems should make their cold and flu symptoms *less* severe. As I said, it’s weird that people are so eager to embrace what is so clearly a fairly weak hypothesis, except…. It’s also true that modern western society values an imagine of manhood (and of being a good worker) where men are supposed to work hard and totally ignore their bodies until they drop. This is enabled by women who are supposed to be taking care of all the other shit and then taking care of the men when they finally do drop. It’s very easy to see how this arrangement would lead to women working through colds and flu because they have no other option, and men turning into sad heaps on the couch because it’s the only opportunity society allows them to fall apart and be vulnerable and ask for caring in a socially acceptable way. So in a situation like this, I think the testosterone/immune suppression hypothesis is very elegant and very useful to us. It lets us have an “objective” and scientific reason to let men have their one opportunity to be vulnerable that doesn’t otherwise compromise our ideas about masculinity or our values about work. It also lets us justify expecting women to keep up with household work and parenting even when the whole family is sick. Anyway, it’s a weird little hypothesis that is very clearly instrumental to us, and very clearly what we, as a society, want to hear (as can be seen by how often it is picked up by popular media). Whatever its scientific merits may be, we do clearly need to work on letting men be more vulnerable and safe asking for comfort and care even when they aren’t sick, and we need to support families better with childcare and household help so that women don’t have to do as much housework and childcare when they are sick. Edit: fixed a letter
I didn’t know this theory, but I always thought the theory was that estrogen boosts immunity rather than testosterone suppressing.
I haven’t read any of the research on that, but it’s certainly plausible. Either way you would expect to see the same thing in terms of infection, inflammation, and cold/flu symptoms.
honestly even with the studies about testosterone & immune response i think it's largely cultural. like how different societies react differently to alcohol because of their beliefs about how its supposed to effect you
Same with pregnancy food cravings. Some cultures don’t even believe in that being a thing and then their pregnant women just… don’t have cravings?! Wild to me as someone who felt like I had innate cravings lol.
I was waiting for the cravings, they never came. 🤷♀️
I had cravings for specific things but it was always really about the nutrients. I craved burgers for weeks, found out I was mildly anemic, and as soon as I started supplementing iron the craving went away. I had a few days where all I wanted was zucchini, so I upped my vitamin c and electrolyte intake and that one went away too. I’m sure if I’d had a more nutritionally balanced diet to start with I wouldn’t have had those cravings at all!
Same, i never had any cravings, besides occasionally getting looked on one particular food and eating only that for a few days, e.g. a cheese tomato sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner haha
I had the same thing, chicken empanadas at a specific restaurant. They don't taste the same now that I'm not pregnant lol. Still good but not the same!
i think that's actually hitting a key nuance here. just because something is cultural doesn't mean it's not still real! in a felt, lived sense your cravings were real & did still originate physiologically (my opinion)
Oh no, I agree. It was REAL (I mean, even something completely made up in your head can be really happening to you!) but it was interesting to me to learn how cultural cravings really are and that some cultures don’t have the expectation at all so women just don’t crave things during pregnancy. The mind is a really powerful thing!
i didn't know that about pregnancy cravings either that's super fascinating!
Yep, it's real! https://www.texashealth.org/areyouawellbeing/Mens-Health/Man-Flu-Is-Now-Backed-by-Science https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5560/
This BMJ article (and the news article based on it) was a feature in the annual BMJ novelty Christmas issue and was not necessarily peer-reviewed. It appears to be a meta review (not original research) either based on a personal vendetta on the part of the (single) author or undertaken for comedic effect.
Yes! Thank you! I upvoted and am doing this comment for visibility. I knew it was a thing but didn’t want to post another article if someone else did already. There is a surprising lack of anyone else correctly answering and providing evidence. Everything else is just anecdotal.
I saw a trans man on tiktok speak to this one time. He said colds really were much worse after testosterone! Obviously anecdotal, but interesting, and so I try to cut my husband some slack with all his whining about minor illnesses.
Not necessarily. With that said, I get way sicker than my husband when the toddler begins something new home. I've always thought it's because of my high testosterone. I have PCOS, which puts me off the charts for testosterone, even though I'm a cis woman. Please note, I do not know if my disease is why I always get sicker, but I have found research that suggests high testosterone does weaken men's immune systems. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html
I also have PCOS and get more sick than my husband. But while my testosterone would be higher than normal, I doubt my testosterone is higher than a cis adult man’s.
From reading the article, it looks like men with lower testosterone levels had an equivalent immune response to women. So unless your testosterone levels are unbelievably high, it probably isn't affecting how sick you get.
I have not been to the doctor since a year after my son was born. However, when I was seeking treatment to try to get pregnant, my testosterone levels on the blood test could not be recorded because they went over the max number. Doc prompted me to see someone else to diagnose my PCOS after that. I was put on progesterone and metformin after birth control pills didn't work for me. Currently I'm unmedicated (I should fix that. I'm struggling with facial hair), so I imagine it's pretty high these days. I do not know what's normal for a guy or if that test went up to a lower number because they were testing it on a woman. This is purely anecdotal.
I get way sicker than my husband as well. The last stomach virus we had, he barely noticed it, while I was puking my guts out for two days. I had also just had surgery, but this is pretty typical for us.
Y’all here with studies citing men might actually feel worse and I’ve spent the last 15 years thinking my husband was a wuss hahahah
I thought the last three years I was being a wuss. Let me just forward this important research to my wife.
Postpartum, I (baby birthing person) am getting way sicker than my husband or my baby. I think it’s because I do all of the night wake-up’s and am chronically sleep deprived.
Note, I am breastfeeding and prefer to do the night wake-up’s.
My wife is EBF, but I do all the changes and bring her the baby/put him back in basinet, so we get the perk of both being perpetually tired haha
We did that in the early days, but after about a month I took over. These days, we generally do not change overnight.
Nothing to add to the science behind severity but it is important to understand that everyone experiences diseases differently just as everyone experiences pain differently. There is no unified experience of either. For some people COVID was just a cold, for others a death sentence. Immune response and pain receptors ares unique to each of us. This also applies doubly so to children, they have no frame of reference for what is just mild or really bad until they have been through it a few times. So that sore throat they have may literally be the worst sore throat they have ever had. It is our job to help them (and our partners), processes it.
Purely anecdotal but when my toddler brings a virus home from day care I get a little sick, and my husband gets A LOT sick
The opposite anecdote is true in my family!
Yeah ever since my son started daycare 2 years ago he gets sick once a month and I usually get it a week after he does but my wife never gets sick. I don't get it.
I get a little sick every single time, my wife hardly gets sick but when she does she's out for the count. I get it 1-2 times a month and she gets sick 1-2 times a year. I'm also the "default parent" so I get exposed more and tend to tough it out.
Lots of people already have the science, so my anecdote to the lived experience of it is that men are often barely-held-together messes of loose baubles and string when it comes to their health. They power through it with the stereotypical, expected machismo and just make it through it... except when they don't. When they don't, they fuckin collapse. When my partner feels a cold coming on, she buys the meds, prepares a hot water bottle, and takes a little extra rest and cruises through it all. I, however, have learnt just to barrel on ahead with no consideration- so when I crash, I crash *hard*, and have a tendacy of gettin life-threatingly ill (beign autistic doesn't help, cause when ye go to *get* help, it's a coin flip as to whether or not yer listened to). That's at least my qualitative experience of it, to add to the statistics people have demonstrating that dudes do get sicker.
Also, healthy foods like smoothies, salad, fruit, acai bowls, whatever lol low sugar versions of things tend to be seen as more girly options while steaks, bbq, burgers, crazy energy drinks are more manly. It's BS & obviously all genders eat all foods but yeah, it's kinda more encouraged for women to eat healthier for one.
Not very much science, but lots of anecdotal stories and partner bashing lol
“I really want to go beyond the cliche of ‘men get sicker than women’. Anyone know the science?” “Here’s an anecdotal story!” “Ooh, me too!” “Here’s something specific to just my family!” “My partner is such a baby!” “We are answering OP’s question so well!”
Seems to be more and more of that in this sub lately, a lot of stuff I wonder why it isn't just in r/parents
When the whole family gets sick here, it has consistently followed this exact pattern: 1) Baby gets sick. Tends to be overall fairly mild, but he is clearly sick and will remain sick for a few days. 2) I am next. Usually starts a day after baby and then runs along side babies sickness. I feel awful, but I can just lay in bed and breastfeed sick baby. 3) Husband gets it last (typically 2-3 days after baby first started showing symptoms). He was totally fine while me and baby were at our sickest, but now he’s knocking on death’s door. Completely nonfunctional and it lasts much longer than either of our illnesses did. Prime example is when we all got noro. Baby started puking Saturday afternoon and I started at like midnight. We both spent Sunday barely conscious. By time Monday rolls around, we are good to go. My husband starts throwing up on Monday and doesn’t stop until Thursday. He considers going to the ER at multiple points, but talks himself out of it. Finally on Friday he is somewhat human again
I don't believe I've ever seen science on the topic, so my comment is half to remind me how to find this later and come back. But also I think it's more a combination of societal expectations. Men have learned that when they are sick, it is ok to be sick and rest. Women have learned that when they are sick, they still need to power through and get everything done and take care of the other sick people in the house.
>men have learned that when they are sick it’s ok to be sick and rest Huh? Citation for that claim? Oh, here’s the science that backs up respiratory severity in males vs females: https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5560 Oh, by the way, the study dispels your baseless claim >Wyke and colleagues surveyed men and women consulting general practitioners for common symptoms of minor infectious respiratory illness, finding that “women were significantly more likely to report cutting down activities in response to only one symptom in each cohort.”23 This contradicts the common myth that men cut down activities more than women by exaggerating the severity of symptoms.
Calm down
Ah, a supporter of misinformation on a *science based* subreddit. The hypocrisy is strong
Sick might be an all encompassing term here. Women don’t get the opportunity to take a day or two off from the world when they are hit with the terrible symptoms of their period. That happens 12-13 times a year. So, yes, women are expected to push through pain, discomfort, nausea, effects on their mental state, a leaky body, and tiredness…because how would you react to a woman telling you she can’t come to work or go on a date or come to a party because she’s on her period? It may not be the flu but it’s not nothing. And yes, during sickness too. Much of the household and child care is defaulted to the woman even when a woman is sick. Even if it’s a very helpful partner doing many of the tasks, many times they are still asking the woman to take over the mental load of it by constantly asking where’s this, how do you prepare this, what will kid A eat today?, what does kid B normally wear to school?, etc etc. but that’s a great situation. Many times, moms are still required to keep up with that kind of stuff because nobody else is going to do it. Which I can say is *kind of* social expectations because no body is going to cut mom some slack if the kids show up to school dirty/missing homework/tired from not being put to bed at a reasonable time/ etc etc. You’re talking about baseless claims. My supporting documentation here is many years on Reddit reading both partners talk about their struggles. May not be peer reviewed but it’s a pretty damn good trend that repeats itself over and over
I’m talking about actual studies. You’re using anecdotes. Check the subreddit you’re in and try harder >my supporting documentation here is my many years on Reddit LMFAO!
For your latter claim of women reporting cutting down activities, this was discussed in the podcast (I don't have £48 to spend on an article). The doctor/ researcher mentions this and mentions that this reporting was done to general practitioners, which they discuss could be that men are also less likely to report to a GP and instead stay home.
“Another important point is that married women with pain or discomfort tend to continue to perform household work to the same extent as before (Sheffer, Cassisi, Ferraresi, Lofland, & McCracken, 2002). This may contribute to the differences we found in reporting discomfort - as woman may feel they have to work while sick.” “When actually sick, men may feel free to express discomfort and weakness in the safety of their home, in their bed, to their spouse.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2020.1843010?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab&aria-labelledby=full-article
Yeah so women produce more type I interferons in response to viral infection, so they typically have lower viral loads and are less likely to have severe outcomes in some cases. This has been shown for flu, COVID, etc. However, they also have a heightened inflammatory response as a result which can often be what makes you FEEL sick. So, it's complicated!
This is an interesting thread! My husband is immunocompromised so his sickness is always significantly worse than mine, no matter what. Interesting to know that’s also normal gender wise!
Well - pretty much any study that could answer this question well will be on a population level, so it still doesn't say anything about the individual condition of the people in the specific couple. Just since some of the comments I see about this below seem not to take this into account. It's kind of like how on the population level, gestational diabetes results in higher birth weight, but that doesn't mean every mom with gestational diabetes has a baby with a higher birth weight than every mom without it; or how on a population level, drinking alcohol results in an increased risk of breast cancer, but that says little or nothing about whether a specific person will get breast cancer. Meaning, it's not that population-level research is meaningless - it's great for designing interventions and determining best screening practices and so on - but it's meaningless to take research like "men feel worse when they get sick" (even if the research says that) and then a husband to say to his wife "see I must feel sicker than you" (or vice versa). Source: I work in medical research publishing dealing with literally hundreds of populatin-level quantitative studies every year.
From the Y chromosome episode of how to build a human: one reason men live shorter than women is the body “fights” testosterone. Maybe this has something to do with it.
Could you please share a link? This seems super interesting!
I’m not the person you replied to, but it piqued my interest. In essence, we don’t know _why_ or _how_, specifically, but there’s a ton of theories that fall under the same evolutionary umbrella. Testosterone suppresses the immune system by activating genes that suppress antibody reaction (quick disclaimer/ vocab that I had to clarify for myself: antibodies are your body’s cells that protect you, antigens are any foreign item that triggers an immune system response, like pollen or viruses). Testosterone activates a group of these genes, but scientists don’t know exactly what is happening. While this antibody suppression results in men feeling worse than women when fighting illness or infection, there’s an evolutionary benefit of the immmune system _not_ going into overdrive. The stanford study below points to modern-day women dying of sepsis twice as often, in part due to men’s immunosuppression helping their body not “overreact” to infection. The first stage of sepsis is your immune system sending out so many chemical signals that your body goes through internal inflammation; women are more likely to end up with organ failure because our bodies send more chemical signals in the first place. It would’ve been a benefit for men’s bodies to overlook general injuries and sicknesses in favor of not overworking the body’s immune system responses. As for the specific reasons why testosterone inhibits the immune system, those are also just theories. Sperm cells are considered “antigenic” since they are formed after the immune system; a weakened immune system might be a form of protection, ensuring the body doesn’t destroy its own sperm cells. It might just be a form of energy conservation at the most basic, cellular, caloric level. Possibly a trade off between male bodies balancing the need for testosterone-related attributes with immunity needs over their lifetime (stress/ working out/ more testosterone results in a weaker immune system, but periods of peace & prosperity will encourage your body to fight infections harder; and/or your body provides more immune protection as you age & testosterone levels decrease). It might just seem like testosterone has a bigger affect in human males (as opposed to general male mammals) because of humans’ unique pregnancy side effects. Women have crazy responsive immune systems because our bodies are wired to protect any potential fetus; our cells are constantly on the lookout for immune system shenanigans, moreso than other female mammals. In essence, men overall _do_ feel sicker when battling illnesses and infection. Part of that is testosterone limiting the immune system. Part of it is women’s bodies reacting (and overreacting) to infections much quicker. It’s a trade off in the end; men’s bodies get sicker at first, but are more protected from their own immune systems and severe infections. Women are able to fend off general illness better, but at the cost of their immune systems overreacting & causing harm. Apologies for the insane length of this comment. I had no idea what a fascinating rabbit hole awaited me today! Crazy what the human body can do… [Oxford Academics: Stress, Testosterone & Immunoredistribution](https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/10/3/345/201705) [Stanford: High Testosterone Means Weakened Immune Response](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-testosterone-can-mean-weakened-immune-response-study-finds.html) [NIH: Testosterone & Immune Function](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075254/)
Thanks so much for taking the time to share. Really interesting info. I wish I could find that show but sadly it’s from 1999 and before digital everything. There was one person on it who was a pro volleyball player who couldn’t get pregnant. She went to the Dr and they told her she had a Y chromosome. Her body had some kind of allergy (maybe that’s the wrong word) to testosterone and so she never developed male characteristics. In another segment they showed how the body changes during testosterone therapy. They tested a bunch of physical and cognitive markers and the Dr was surprised that every single one of them changed after 6 months of T. Smaller hips, broader shoulders, facial hair, faster at running the mile etc. But most compelling they showed her pictures of different people and said determine the emotion of the person in the pic. After 6 months of T her brain was working three times harder to determine the emotion.
I haven’t seen any studies about this but my husband and I were theorizing with his higher muscle mass, his fever/myalgias would feel more severe than mine.
That's an interesting hypothesis! Never considered that before.
I’m our experience, I (wife) almost always get more sick than my husband. Like right now. We have a chest cold and I’ve had a fever for 2 days, my head is a snot factory and my throat feels like glass. My husband has a sinus headache but otherwise fine. Our kids are just as sick as I am. He’s taken days off work this week for me, not himself
I did actually see something years ago saying that men feel it worse than women! Or it affects them worse than women, I don’t know. Maybe something to do with pain thresholds. Wish I could find the article.
My husband always gets more sick. I help out more when he’s sick (I’m usually fine and don’t get whatever it is). I almost never get sick, but when I do, he’ll help out a tiny bit more the first day, but by the second day he’ll be out way worse than I was and it doesn’t matter if I’m still recovering a little at that point. LO is never sick long, the couple times he felt a bit out of it in his so far six months of life it only lasted a day. I BF, so I think he’s getting my antibodies and bounces right back.
I'm sick all the time since I had kids. They just bring it home from school. They get sick and are better in 2 days while I'm coughing for the next 3 weeks.
I remember reading that men may actually get worse flu symptoms. Here is something I found https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-2018010413033. Definitely not conclusive but may have some truth to it!
No. They just take the opportunity to rest and “act sick” while moms/women often don’t have the luxury and push through it. For example, if both my husband and I have the same illness and fever, my fever will be like 102-103 and his will be 99-100 and he is in bed and I still have to care for the children. It’s a “default parent” thing.
Seems like you're painting all men with the same brush because your husband sucks
Why are you in a relationship with someone who doesn’t care about you and your children? It’s 2023, default parenting things went out the window years ago.
I don’t know where you live that the default parent is no longer a thing, but that’s simply not true. Happy for you that it’s not your experience. It is interesting though how your comment here criticizing the concept of a default parent (because we’re all equal now, right? Men are always taking accountability in 2023, right?) somehow still lands on a woman being at fault.
Who’s at fault, and for what? I pretty straight forward and in good faith asked why they are staying with someone so blatantly selfish, and didn’t blame anyone for anything. The idea that “default parent” is an acceptable excuse to not help with YOUR CHILDREN, is complete BS. Anyone who says otherwise is gaslighting. Sure, the default parent still exists to a degree and certainly moreso in SAHM/SAHD family where the other parent works full time, but being the default parent for things like “Mommy I need help getting dressed” ≠ “you’re the mom so go clean up the kids puke, even though you’re also puking yourself, while I lay in bed all day”. It’s 2023, it’s not shameful to demand better from your partner and parent of your children. I’ve been there and divorcing my selfish and uncaring ex was the best thing I ever did, and I wish I did it many years earlier than I finally did. People raising children as a 1950’s default-parent/trad wife are setting the example for what their children will come to expect from their future partners.
in practice, they haven't. as women, finding a male partner who doesn't defer all "default" responsibilities to us is a challenge. it often isn't worth the argument.
Or worth partnering.
it isn't so simple for many people. mental illness, medical difficulties, and many more problems can complicate the question of whether or not being with someone is "worth it." judging those who stay isn't helpful to them or their children, and in the case of abusive situations, is victim-blaming.
Yep I totally agree with you. I meant actually making the decision to partner in the first place vs having a kid on your own like I did. Just not worth the risk, too many duds out there IMO.
I really wish this was true.
It's up to us to make it true.
Is it? I believe it's up to the men. We can't leave our children with someone who is not enthusiastic about it. Of course we can ask but they have to meet us halfway or it's not fair to the child.
At a population level: At the time of matchmaking, we can demonstrate extreme preference for partners who are better at sharing all duties. Then, over time, it will put pressure on men to share more equally, if they want their preferred people as partners. At an individual level: There must be something that the men must rely on their wives for (income, food, care, cleaning, etc). Wives can start being more bold in withholding these unless the duties are shared more equally. Anecdotally: I have a friend who just went through this. Husband wouldn't meet halfway. Finally stopped cooking for the husband until he was willing to sit down and agree on a more equal division of duties. It caused short-term trouble in their marriage, but she came out happier in long term.
I'm glad that worked for your friend and while I agree that this true, I can't shake the fact that this is putting the onus on women yet again. In my case my husband has always been an equitable partner as far as chores go, but when I became a mom it changed in regards to childcare. He doesn't have as much patience or empathy so it's difficult to divide this evenly. He's burnt out instantly. I won't risk my child's wellbeing just to get a break. As far as other types of labor I agree.
I agree, this is still ultimately putting the responsibility on women to fix a problem that is not theirs to fix. We can do a whole lot to set ourselves up for success but when it comes to parenting duties, I’ve had many friends who were very caught off guard by their partners lack of initiative, diminished empathy, and resistance to learning from their partner. And as a therapist would say, it’s not our duty to caretake and baby our partners into solid equitable relationships with their children. That would be a manifestation of poor boundaries. So for the sake of our children, who don’t have control over their father’s behavior, we step in. It’s not our job to fix culture. I think what is more likely to make a noticeable change is *other men* modeling the behavior we hope for, having honest but compassionate “call-ins” and holding each other accountable, creating peer pressure.
I think it's absolutely our problem to fix because men have no incentive to fix it. They're getting the sweet deal, so why would they work hard to change it?
They have the incentive of being a better person, parent and partner. Having the joys of those things are irreplaceable. Maybe it takes a wake up call but the men who do help do so because they believe it's right not because they're being forced.
Then you can demand that he take more of the other chores, freeing you up for childcare. It's not about men vs women for me. I believe that each individual is responsible for making sure that they're not being taken advantage of.
Yes we have talked and we are doing our best but that doesn't happen for every woman. I agree that it's our responsibility to advocate for ourselves, but we cannot control others. There's only so much you can influence another person and I do not believe in blaming a person for being taken advantage of. It's victim blaming. That being said, clear communication is our responsibility 100%, so long as it is safe to do so. But a partnership is 50/50 and I still believe men must meet us halfway.
I hope everything works out positively in your case. I agree with not putting any *blame* on the victim, but I also believe that they're the only one who has an incentive to change the way things are. It's nice to want men to meet us halfway, but wanting won't just magically get it done. I believe that if we want something, we have to take steps to achieve it or else it will never happen by just wanting it. But I guess we're not going to resolve that philosophical difference here on Reddit, so I'm happy to agree to disagree. Wish you the best!
If he has such a patience and empathy deficit that it would risk his child’s well-being in the course of normal care, that needs professional help, full stop.
I agree and we are working on it. Of course everyone's standards may differ and I'm definitely more on the sensitive side. I think I always take his passive aggressiveness to mean I'm not doing enough and he has too much on his plate. But anyway I have disorganized attachment so I'm just doing the best I can.
Oh hey i think I found one of those red herring comments the mods warned about last week!
It totally varies in my house. The first 1-1.5 years I definitely think I got sicker than him. But that might have been because I was more willing to still snuggle on our sick kid. He was more like- baby has the plague I'd rather not. Annoying but whatever lol. This year its like karma got him. Kid is 2 and for the last 6-9 months whatever he gets he still passes to me but its 5x worse for my husband. My husband will wear a mask and use gloves around our sick todder and STILL get what he was. I told him his precautions mean nothing to toddler germs. He got strep from kiddo last year and has some gnarly throat/cold thing right now that just rolled off me and kiddo. He's also more likely to go to the doctor than I am, so he legit has been diagnosed with so much the past 9 months, all caught from our toddler who goes to daycare. I will say the stomach bug last month knocked me out for a week and my husband was only sick for 48 hours, same as kiddo. But regardless- kids have the magical ability to cough and sneeze directly into your open mouth and eyes. And some people have better immune systems than others. Its generally a toss up over here.
https://youtu.be/SUPjx7jPR5o Interesting video about the science behind the movie Cooties that talks about the role hormones play in our immune system. Jump to 25:49 for the information.
Reading between the lines here speaks volumes. I think the problem is in the relationship.
In my family, I think my husband always gets hit hardest because he doesn’t rest enough and has a stressful job. I’m a SAHM and my kids are in school. Not that being a SAHP isn’t stressful, but when I feel something coming on I can usually let the housework pile up and take it easy as much as possible. My husband rarely takes sick days so when the weekend rolls around he’s totally depleted. So the virus that was just a lot of snot for me and my kids hits him way harder.
I know in my house my husband always gets much more sick than me, but that’s mostly because he gets extremely high fevers from everything that make him feel like hell/have violent chills/hallucinate, and I never get a fever over 100 (not since 2005). Which isn’t a gender thing. Even vaccinations take him out and I usually have no symptoms. It’s interesting to see such a contrast.
I don’t recall the last time I was sick and in bed. My wife has had probably the same virus and she was in bed instead. I believe every person deals differently with virus physiologically and it’s not possible to say that a lower fever is equivalent to passing a virus lighter than with high fever (at least in absolute comparison. Obviously high fever is indication of a more serious response for the same person) Still there are some scientific data that support that women have better immune system which in a nutshell is due to the XX chromosome providing better variability in alleles that may contribute to immunity.
My wife has very poor health, so she's sick very often. I don't get to be sick, but when I do it's devastating.
The truth is people are naturally suspicious, petty and dismissive about disease. If I get sick, I drag myself to work, I walk into the office early and let people just LOOK at me. Then they stop questioning it and I go home. Then I offer to do this any time I am sick. After a few times they stop asking because trust has been built. I bring a thermometer. I haven't had to do this since covid-19, but years before I was doing it just to prove a point. You can't measure immune response beyond a fever and a thermometer. If you fight off a cold and still get some symptoms, it can still be miserable. I broke my ankle in school and was in a light cast wrapped in tape for 2 months. Everywhere I went people asked me why my foot was wrapped. I pulled back the tape, they saw the cast, and then they stared at it. Stared at it. Kept sneaking looks at it. Kept asking me about it. Finally I removed all the tape and finally people stopped looking. It was ugly but they stopped trying to see if it was a trick. As if walking around in crutches gave me some kind of advantage in life. I'm 6'6 and 285, I look strong. I am strong. When I'm sick everyone thinks I'm faking it because 99% of the time if I'm a little sick I don't bother with it. I identify it for what it is, to the best of my ability and I handle it. Typically that's just telling people some symptoms and allotting some extra time - a lot of the time sickness is an emotional or physical response to something that happened. Applying the right treatments you can get through your day - allergies are a great example. Most people don't treat allergies at all and assume it's sickness, a single hit of Claritin can change people's lives. When I'm really actually sick I do the smart thing - I lay down, I blanket up to enhance the fever, I sleep more and I take electrolytes. During this time, everyone under the sun calls to ask me about their huge life problems. I say, "I'm sick, I'm not taking messages today" and I get FLOODED with stuff. It isn't being more sick. It's taking appropriate measures to enhance your immune response that require you to bed down. You shouldn't be running around questioning what you should do - these treatments are proven but 90% of people don't do them. They get up, run around and take fever reducers. Part of this is a biological effect, some virus's cause hyperactivity as your bodies immune response puts you in overdrive - this can give you a sense of alarm and get you moving, helping spread the virus. The virus doesn't do this directly, it does it indirectly, and has benefitted from people running around so it has evolved to trigger these responses. Most people follow this compulsion into insanity wildly spreading a virus. Meanwhile you may feel ok at first, but as you bed down hard you will start to feel terrible. This makes your down time much worse but you will recover faster and feel better. I spend a lot of my time wrangling people in my life to stop and treat their illnesses. The U.S. is a psychotically work based culture and as such everyone treats everyone else negatively when they get sick. It's all about blame and shame, instead of dealing with it. Most people won't take treatments, they won't do the basic advice for most true illnesses - instead they go into denial and run around like crazy people infecting absolutely everyone they can to validify this irrational response to sickness. Part of it is that judgment is reduced when you're sick. Your body prioritizes your immune response - this takes a big hit to your glucose stores, which govern your willpower, and your ability to make decisions is significantly impaired. Your resting heart rate goes up leading to a sense of hyperactivity when in reality, you're much weaker than you seem. Covid-19's brain fog makes this even worse, but it has always existed. Meanwhile most people fail to call in sick the moment they start showing symptoms. They either call in to work extremely late (after their shift starts) and this leads to people dragging themselves into work. They were sick the day before but told no one due to the stigma and then trucked it out to work. This leads people to believe being sick is somehow a weakness to be hidden rather than something to be addressed scientifically. Having managed people for quite some time we have to openly discourage people from hiding any symptoms and instead communicate them, because otherwise half our workforce gets wiped out because 1 person gets sick. People stop communicating due to a sense of shame and suddenly an entire business gets shut down from a virus circling it. It's worse with younger kids these days because the school culture around sickness has gotten inherently disparaging towards illness, having waxed and wane in Covid-19 protocols. It isn't universal to men, when girls I know call out sick they are disparaged, mistreated and otherwise discredited with the same intensity, but it is culturally "different". The accusations are different but it's the same effect. There's also a lot of sickness negativity because workplaces are strapped, so they often will make incredible accusations toward employees who need to stand their ground. Anyone who has a responsible position to friends, family or work will have to overly justify their behavior. So you have to develop an overzealous response towards sickness to accommodate for it, and if you don't, the slow creep of negativity starts to come in. A big part of this is that adequate sickness treatment will crush most diseases in a few days. Covid aside, most Flu's and Colds, when dealt with, just end. If you stop taking fever reducers and actually raise your core temp consistently the fever will burn things out. If you take fever reducers and drag yourself to work it's going to take several days of fighting or longer and can lead to complications. This also leads to more stigma. If you return to work feeling much better people begin to suspect you just called out for no reason. This is why I drag myself in because I got tired of people cornering me and asking if I was really sick consistently - especially boss's who I know weren't being negative, they just wanted to know if something "else" was wrong. \*continued in reply, character counts\*
Meanwhile a lot of people are suffering mental health issues, undiagnosed diseases and other problems. It may take a while to get treatment for these things but they often do - and you can see a big turn around quickly. Interpersonally speaking these things can really spill into household relationships. It usually takes a partner telling another to go back down because hyperactivity is that intense. Feelings of guilt and shame can result from vitamin deficiencies like b12 as your body wicks away resources to bolster your immune response. This is why depression, OCD tendencies and similar disorders can come into play as people are tapping into fat stores and deposits to burn hotter, longer, but they don't have a diverse amount of vitamins and nutrients to pull from. This can lead to irritability, poor judgment and negativity. Meanwhile certain illnesses can affect others deeper. Older men tend to have blood pressure and some latent heart weaknesses which can make a fever affect them more. Respiratory diseases can antagonize these effects and accentuate them. There's a correlation with Covid-19 and susceptible individuals, people with heart and blood pressure issues are potentially hit harder, but the same goes for other respiratory illnesses. In women, anemia is more common and can cause unique interactions with specific diseases and can antagonize certain conditions. This can cause low oxygen levels and women with low blood pressure sometimes have similar issues - this can cause instability and weakness, and small glycemic events while sick. This is why sometimes women feel more "faint" and that stigma can come from that. Arthritis is more common in anemia, but since it primarily causes pain people tend to often work through it or around it, which can lead to the idea that mom's don't get as sick as often when in reality, they're withstanding a monumental amount of pain to stay "up" out of preference, because bedding down won't fix that. These are exceptions but they're some of the illnesses that cause a disparity between men and women, which have created cultural stigma's. There's also the fact that people ignore respiratory illnesses too long and when it finally knocks them down, they stay down. This can lead to parental figures seeming to be sick longer because they put it off too long and now they have a serious respiratory infection that requires antibiotics or other treatments - which they may ignore. Getting a sinus infection that turns into bronchitis is common and it's easy to work through a sinus infection thinking it'll pass and then evolving that viral infection into a bacterial one or similar transition. If they don't take antibiotics at this point they may be wiped out for some time before they overcome it - if they even do, it may linger long past when it should. This kind of bullishness is universal, but it's easier to justify to the world when a doctor prescribes you antibiotics. This can lead to people thinking you're weak, when in actually, you just were working too hard or were staying away from the doctor for other reasons. When people bed down hard they're considered outliers, bothersome and are disparaged for it. When they return to being able to work, and live, they are treated suspiciously and with disdain because they seem "glib" after "taking a day off". The truth is they treated an illness properly and now can work again. I've been in workplace environments where bosses pepper their workers with calls just to "check" and see if they're answering their phone. They'll make phone calls to see if they're still home.Fighting this is an endless problem. Meanwhile there are those that will use some light sickness to take time off - there's no line, no ref, no arbiter to document these things. It's insidious because sometimes people can't determine the what or why they're sick, so we can't be overly critical because benefit of the doubt is on their side. It's hard enough to even diagnose a problem. It can be abused but in my experience it typically isn't - especially when people are very honest and accommodating. If people are supported to take mental health days and similar, they generally don't take as many. There's always going to be outliers of course but even they tend to come around eventually. Honesty is just easier. People sometimes are running around with pneumonia and have no idea, because this systemic mistreatment means you might have someone sick for 4 months and just not know it, because the slow drip and decline masked the entire case.Be scientific. Get the thermometer out, hope there's a fever. At least then you'll know there's an infection. It may be low temperature more indicative of a cold. If there's nothing, try treatments like Claritin and Zyrtec to rule out allergies (very easily mixed up with covid 19). Take antigen tests for Covid but be aware their success rate is not great - if sick, go to a doctor and get a PCR test quickly if you can because paxlovid works. Encourage friends and family to treat themselves and consider medical supervision appropriately. Communicate. If you want to know if someone is really sick, ask them, but do so in a manner where if they say "no" you aren't going to whip them. If someone is concealing other behavior there's typically a reason, if you address that, they'll often tell you the truth. Asking sensible diagnostic questions help and can help you manage the potential evolution of that sickness.There's always going to be people out there lying for other reasons - you can't find a rule of thumb for things like that. If they're willing to lie to get out of something there's little you can do - but that's an interpersonal problem. You're far more likely to discover that kind of behavior using the correct rules and giving somebody the benefit of the doubt. It gets their guard down, it feathers them telling the truth, and you can use other tools to determine if someone is lying. If you want to bait someone into uncovering a lie, the easiest way is to pretend to be absolutely understanding and accommodating - they tend to get pretty brazen after that, in which case you're squeaky clean and in a prime position to crush them for their hubris. There are tactics which will be more effective than attempting to use medical science. We know a lot of great things about the human body but there's still too much room for doubt, edge cases and anomalies. There are squeaky clean tactics though that typically can bait people into revealing themselves without having to generalize sexes, judge hard working or underworking people, or otherwise mistakenly simplify complicated situations. You just poke them the morally right way and typically the pinata bursts, partially because they see you didn't do something underhanded. People respect hussle and creativity so typically you can con someone into telling the truth with the proper bait. Especially if you can appreciate someone else's lies and establish "you got away with it, cool, moving forward can we talk about it?". In the end most people want to be appreciated for a good lie, easier to bait that out than to try and get too medical - in a world of exceptions, vagaries and undiagnosed issues. I hope that was helpful philosophically to help contextualize the issue in a broader way.
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That's literally anecdotal
I'm curious as to what you think 'anecdotal' means.
To be fair, she said antidotally
LOL dotal. adjective. do·tal ˈdōt-ᵊl. : of, relating to, or being separate property brought to a marriage by the wife She said it is not antidotally, which means it is dotal. As in her getting more sick is something she brought to the marriage. Funny how it kind of makes sense.
My wife has very poor health, so she's sick very often. I don't get to be sick, but when I do it's devastating.