How do you solve tough problems? Maybe you pick at them until they’re gone. Maybe you dance around them until they’re contained. One thing I like to do is to step away and examine them as an outsider, from a completely different perspective. In other words, get out of the trees and look at the whole forest. It’s amazing what you can learn from taking a new angle.
Honing Heuristics
There are quite a few problems in the field of men’s health that need solving. To me, this is more than just trying my hardest to solve the infertility or sexual health problems of patients I see daily. There are other, equally important but more diffuse, issues with which I am also obsessed, including:
- Why are infertile men less healthy than fertile men?
- What biomarkers can we use in young men to predict their future health?
- How do we help men become more engaged in their health care?
- Is there value in having a federal Office of Men’s Health?
What better time to think about these issues than during Men’s Health Month, which is now upon us. And what better way to start off the month than by taking a completely different perspective on things.
Pop Up Art
For millennia, art has struck every emotionally charged chord in the composition that is life. Using caricature, satire and symbolism, it has dished vanity, excess, corruption, greed, and politics. At the same time, it has memorialized life, love, sex and everything else under the sun that holds human meaning. I admire what Pablo Picasso said about art: “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” It seems natural, then, to have a Pop-Up Art Show about men and fertility.
Elizabeth Walker is founder and curator of The ART of Infertility, a travelling infertility artwork, oral history and portraiture project. I attended a show she held in LA last year and was deeply moved by the emotional rawness and creative expression in art made by those affected by the scourge of infertility. Sculptures of beautiful flowers made from IVF needles and syringes; a lovely baby’s crib filled with empty fertility medication vials, bottles and boxes. If you don’t believe that the epidemic of infertility affects lives like cancer or the plague, you need hear these stories, told through art.
And now you can. Please join me for the next Art of Infertility Pop Up Art Show entitled “Picture Your Fertility: An Interactive Art Event for #MensHealth“ to be held in my San Francisco office on June 16th. Be sure to reserve your space by registering here. Plan to be there as we share the infertility journeys of men and their families through artwork and stories. Partake of food and drink, and feel free to tell your own story at our art-making stations. Maybe, just maybe, in some small way, this brief evening-of-art will wash away the dust of daily life from your soul and thereby render it reachable and realizable.
The Art of Infertility, The Turek Clinic & Men’s Health Network present:
A Pop Up Art Show
“Picture Your Fertility: An Interactive Art Event for #MensHealth”
June 16, 2016 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm
The Turek Clinic San Francisco
55 Francisco St, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94133
Tax-deductible donations welcome!
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