Browsing recently through a local bookshop I was struck by the many magazines devoted to women's health problems. There were masses of articles about breast diseases, womb problems, conception and fertility, and pre-menstrual and menopausal difficulties. And that doesn't include all those articles for overweight women and the diets and weird exercises that would cure them.

In the midst of all this, I found not one article dealing with health problems purely for men. Many men are too embarrassed to take their worries about their more personal physical problems to their doctors - and they will have to look hard to find their solution in the popular 'health' magazines.

So this is for them. One problem that seems to be on the increase is testicular cancer. We don't know why, but happily, we do know that modern treatments can cure it completely. Bob Champion's story - he won the Grand National after surgery and radiotherapy for the disease 20 years ago, and is still alive and well - should encourage any young man with it today to be optimistic. Alan Stubbs, Celtic's ace defender, found he had the disease last spring, and was back to full training in weeks and first team matches within a few months.

And last week Just Relax! told the story of Andrew Shippey, diagnosed with testicular cancer at the age of 18, but who is now running marathons to raise money for cancer research.

The brilliant thing about most testicular cancers is that they can be cured even when they have spread to organs like the lungs - an incurable stage for other tumours. But it is still best to detect it as early as possible. Alan Stubbs's tumour was detected from rising hormone levels in a urine test taken as a drug check after a match. He was lucky, because the tumour was detected long before he could have noticed any problem himself.

That option isn't open to the rest of us, but every young man should know how to examine his testicles and scrotum for anything abnormal. Look for any change in size, either bigger or smaller, or change in texture, particularly if one seems harder than the other. Or an obvious lump in a testicle that was not there before.

Most lumps in and around testicles are not tumours but hydroceles, cysts or hernias, so if you find one, don't start worrying. Your doctor will gently feel the lump, and will do two small tests. One is to hold a pen torch behind the scrotum at the level of the lump: if the light shines clearly through it, this points to it being a 'hydrocele'.

This is a small cyst that develops around the tube leading from the testicle into the groin. The other test is to try to lift the scrotum upwards and fold it backwards over the lower abdomen. If the lump prevents that from being done, it is usually a hernia - in which a loop of bowel has slid down the groin into the scrotum. A cough will confirm this - if it is a hernia the impulse from the raised pressure inside the stomach is transmitted into a hernia, but not into a hydrocele or testicle tumour.

So your doctor has a pretty good idea just from the feel and the mobility of the scrotum of what may be wrong, and will send you to the appropriate specialist. Hydroceles and hernias are dealt with by simple surgery, often on a day care basis. If there is a suspicion of a testicle tumour, you will be very quickly assessed, and the appropriate treatment started. This is usually a mixture of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Today, success rates are well over 95 per cent.

Testicles first form inside the abdomen of the developing baby boy inside the womb: they travel to their eventual resting place on a path that takes them along the groin into the scrotum. Occasionally, at birth, a testicle on one side still lies in the groin or (much more rarely) inside the abdomen. If left in these positions, the testicle can develop abnormally and be more prone to disease, so it's important to ensure that both testicles are in the right place at birth. Simple surgery to put them into the right place is needed, sooner, rather than later.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.