From the gleaming limestone lobby to the chocolate and oxblood exam room walls to the percussive address, 555 Madison Avenue, a new clinic in Midtown Manhattan exudes masculinity, and that is no accident.
Still smelling of fresh paint, it is NYU Langone Medical Center's health center devoted to men, one of two such centers opened in the last two years by major New York hospitals, within 10 blocks of each other, and using marketing techniques common to lifestyle companies and luxury spas.
"The glass ceiling has been broken; now there's a health center just for men," goes one NYU Langone advertising slogan, with a tongue-in-cheek hint of transgression. Says another: "It's the gentlemen's club your wife would approve of."
NYU Langone and other medical institutions have long had services devoted to women, an outgrowth of the belief that the male-dominated medical establishment had not paid enough attention to their particular needs.
Now men are beginning to get equal treatment as hospitals try to take advantage of an enormous untapped market: men who, studies show, avoid doctors for virtually anything short of a bullet wound. The new clinics offer one-stop shopping for services ranging from heart monitoring to hair removal to hormone therapy, from the life-prolonging to the life-enhancing, if medically debatable.
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