It's This Stinking Job · Prostate Paladin

It's This Stinking Job

A survey of 640 taxi drivers came out in Korea this week. 96.2% had experienced a urinary symptom in the past month. Just under half were at a level that gets in the way of ordinary life.

Two things before we go further, because you should know both.

That survey was paid for by a drug company that sells a prostate product. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to name the product. So I went looking for independent work and found it - a group in Florence, Italy surveyed taxi drivers with nobody selling anything and landed in the same place, that these symptoms are shaped by the type and the length of a man's work.

And neither of them proves that driving causes any of this. The prostate grows with age. That is going to happen to nearly all of us whatever we did for a living.

Here is what I actually think is going on, and it is not in either paper.

The job hands a man an excuse that fits.

I did the same thing for years, just with a different excuse. Mine was age. I was getting older, so of course I was slower. Of course I was up in the night. It never occurred to me to wonder whether the explanation was doing any work for me, or whether I had simply found a reason that let me stop looking.

A driver has a much better excuse than I had. Long hours in a seat. No toilet when he needs one. A schedule that punishes stopping. Every one of those is true. And all of it together means he can go fifteen years without once treating the symptom as information.

The bit that caught me was which symptom came top of the Korean list. Nocturia - getting up in the night - at 78.9%. Higher than any of the others.

He is not at work at three in the morning.

That one I cannot make the job explain, and I have tried.

So the question for this group.

For those of you who drove for a living, or did shift work, or had any job where you could not just go when you needed to, or just sat in an office chair for years..... - how long did you put the symptoms down to the work? And what was it in the end that made you look again?

I am asking because I suspect a fair few of you have an answer to that, and somebody reading this is still fifteen years behind you.

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It's This Stinking Job