For a grown man, David Murphy looked a little sheepish. Having to admit that he didn't take good care of his health was not something that came naturally.
Murphy, a 57-year-old publisher, had a lot of company yesterday at a conference - the first of its kind - that targeted the health concerns of African-American men. Any who showed up at the Baltimore Convention Center, and hundreds did, were provided with free screenings for all manner of ills, from diabetes to hypertension, immune deficiencies to heart disease.
"I'm not feeling 100 percent, and that's why I'm here," said Murphy, who publishes an online business and consumer guide, The Maryland Portal, and who admitted that he is uninsured and does not have a physician. "I'm being screened for everything. When you get to my age, you start getting the aches and pains, and you've got to get checked."
As a nurse was about to draw a droplet of blood from his finger, the only thing Murphy asked was not to be photographed "screaming and hollering."
The notion was apt, given the reluctance of many people to see a physician once in a while and to pay attention to whatever emerges from the visit.
"African-American men have a problem going to the doctor," said Joe Cooke, an educator in the HIV/AIDS unit of the state's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He said there were enormous health problems in the black community that were not being addressed, primarily because, he said, African-American men often disregard their higher propensity toward certain diseases that do not affect other races to the same degree.
"The disparities for all of this - prostate cancer, HIV, diabetes - are alarming, much higher than in the majority community," Cooke, 50, said after discussing his own cardiovascular system with a specialist. "We need to educate people. If you're not getting treatment for a lot of these killers, they're ticking time bombs waiting to go off."
Some of the tests were for less alarming conditions. When Mike Jenkins, a 40-year-old travel agent, drove up from Columbia with his son Michael, 13, for the conference, the first thing he spotted was a man who appeared to be weighing people on an old-fashioned metal scale. It turned out to be a machine that, when stepped on, calibrates the distribution of the body's weight on the feet, and thus whether the person's stance is tilted toward one side or the other.
