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integral

Science

Foreskin for Clear Skin?

By Julia Wallace Posted on 11.21.2008 18 Comments
It sounds like just another uber-meltable cheese product, but Vavelta is actually miles away from anything you'd want to put in your mouth. It's a radical new treatment for facial pitting, scarring, and wrinkles made out of—what else?—newborns' foreskins. Foreskins have long been treasured by cosmetic dermatologists because they are rich in fibroblasts, tiny cells that play a crucial role in healing wounds and generating collagen and connective tissue.

11.22.2008 at 02:16am - Comment by integral

Sometimes - very rarely - circumcision is necessary, but not nearly as often where "routine" circumcision is uncommon and they know about alternatives. bkdude might have had a different outcome in Germany, for example. He should certainly not feel bad for the 3/4 of the world's men who enjoy an unmodified penis. "There are also ethical issues to consider ... does blending them into an epithelial milkshake and injecting them into aging faces like so much Botox cross some kind of line?" That line was crossed long ago when they started cutting them off babies. No other healthy body part is treated with such contempt for its owner's future wishes or rights.
Science

This Week In Sex

By Julia Wallace Posted on 10.14.2008 7 Comments
It's been a hot week in the science of sex. First of all, for all of you Intactivists out there (and I know there are a lot of you round these parts), a major finding might bolster your claim that routine circumcision isn't worth the risk.

10.23.2008 at 03:25am - Comment by integral

You're absolutely right that studying circumcision is tricky - not least because just everybody, including the researchers, has a vested interest in this most intimate modification. One of the most prominent, Daniel Halperin, is on record as thinking his descent from a ritual circumcisor means “maybe in some small way I’m ‘destined’ to help pass along [circumcision] to people in [other] parts of the world … .” (Cover Story: The Case for Circumcision. By Gordy Slack. The East Bay Express Online. May 19-24, 2000.) Whatever else that it, it’s not science. Every story about circumcision, including this one, seems determined to maximise the benefits and minimise or ignore the risks and actual harm. In the real (third) world, circumcision has an astonishing 18% complication rate in clinics, and 35% when "performed" by traditional circumcisors, according to the World Health Organisation. As for gay men (and female partners), they're not asking what effect the penetrator's circumcision status has on the "penetree" - for example whether the hardened glans is more likely to create the micro-tears that facilitate the entry of HIV, or whether circumcised men become more vigorous/violent in intercourse as they try to stimulated their dramatically reduced number of nerve endings (there is ample evidence from US vs European porn that they do).
Science

A Little Off the Top, S'Il Vous Plait

By Isadora Botwinick Posted on 10.2.2008 23 Comments
Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . foreskin? Who knew that penises had anything to do with the French Revolution?

10.9.2008 at 02:51pm - Comment by integral

Isodora's blather about catheters made me laugh. I have just spent three days in hospital: the first hour, a surgeon worked through my urethra hollowing out my prostate. I don't know how thick his instrument was - I was out to it - but an earlier procedure involved one nearly 1 cm thick involving a camera, lighting and a supply of water. For the next two days, a catheter emerged from the end of my pcnis as thick as a thick ballpoint pen - about 1cm. At no point did anyone ask me if I am circumcised (I'm obviously not), mention my foreskin, or make any particular effort about putting it in one position or another. (In fact the only person to mention it was me, just before I signed the form giving them permission to do whatever they liked with my body. I said I valued my foreskin and hoped it would still be there when I woke up - a prudent precaution in the light of the man in Kentucky who woke from a circumcision without his pcnis. The consultant said there was nothing to worry about, and there wasn't - but then, I'm not in the U.S.) And she's wrong about Louis XVI. According to this well-researched article, he suffered not from phimosis but frenulum breve (Short frenulum - and also extreme inhibition), and he was successfully treated with a tiny nick to it. http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=78 It's no secret that foreskins *are* bought and sold for medical and cosmetic purposes - Oprah advertises the products! And it's true that circumcision removes the most sensitive part of the pcnis. See http://www.circumstitions.com/Sexuality.html#sorrells. "Phimosis is cured by circumcision"? Sure, and headache is cured by decaptitation.
Science

A Little Off the Top, S'Il Vous Plait

By Isadora Botwinick Posted on 10.2.2008 23 Comments
Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . foreskin? Who knew that penises had anything to do with the French Revolution?

10.8.2008 at 05:45pm - Comment by integral

Heyitsme: "I see no possible way that a double blind circumcision trial could even be conducted." Absolutely. That doesn't mean double-blinded and placebo-controlled aren't still the gold standard, from which the three African trials inevitably fell short. (They could have gone some way toward placebo control with a dummy operation, an incision in the region removing no tissue, requiring the same aftercare and imposing the same risk of infection.) We know the surgical group got safe-sex warnings the contol group didn't. As for a meta-analysis of the three RCTs, well, garbage in, garbage out. They were hardly independent: the authors have before and since variously published together. "such concerns about early study termination have not been advanced in regard to the new Krieger et al. results." Hardly relevant when that was a snapshot of sexual effects before and after circumcision. The flaw with that study is that almost all the men, circumcised or not, reported virtually perfect sex both before and after. How very different from our own dear sex lives, and from every other study. (They asked questions on a five-point scale - much more, more, the same, less, much less - but reduced the answers to three points, more, the same, or less. I wonder why? Perhaps if they'd left the more sensitive outcome they might not have got a result they wanted?) Nor were the men a random sample of the population: all were paid volunteers for circumcision, who knew what the study hoped to prove. "It doesn't seem to have a significant effect on reproductive success in modern man." In our lifetimes, most of us have sex some thousands of times. (Weekly from 20 to 50 y o = ~1500) Our "reproductive success" is perhaps 2 or 3. Clearly that is not why we do it. In fact, hey, most of us do it because it feels good, and a foreskin, being chock-full of sensitive nerves, makes it feel even better. So cutting the foreskin off a baby is just, well, MEAN.
Science

A Little Off the Top, S'Il Vous Plait

By Isadora Botwinick Posted on 10.2.2008 23 Comments
Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . foreskin? Who knew that penises had anything to do with the French Revolution?

10.8.2008 at 03:53pm - Comment by integral

Isodora's blather about catheters made me laugh. I have just spent three days in hospital. First, a surgeon spent an hour working through my urethra in my prostate, hollowing it out. I don't know - I was out to it - how thick his instruments were. Then I spent two days with a catheter as thick as a thick ballpoint pen (~1cm) coming out the head of my penis. Nobody ever asked if I was circumcised (I'm obviously not) and my foreskin was never an issue - except that just before I signed the form saying they could do whatever they needed, I did say I valued it and hoped it would still be there when I woke up. The consultant said that wasn't a problem. (Bearing in mind the man in Kentucky who woke up from a circumcision without his penis, that seems a fair precaution.) And it's not true about Louis XVI. See http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=78 He seems to have had, not phimosis but frenulum breve, a short frenulum, which was treated with a tiny nick, "Phimosis can be cured with circumcision." Sure, and headache can be cured with decapitation. The trials in Africa (held by a group of circumcision enthusiasts) had significant flaws. Not being double blinded, the circumcised men were treated quite differently from the non-circumcised control group. Dropouts outnumbered the known HIV infections by several times, and clearly, finding you were circumcised and HIV+ would disillusion you with the trial and make you more likely to drop out, so the whole claim of "prevention" could be spurious. The cases circumcision didn't prevent just didn't come back. A meta-analysis has just shown that circumcision is of no benefit to men who have sex with men - the biggest risk of sexual transmission in the developed world. (In Africa, the risk is multiple partners, passing around the virus when it is at its most virulent. Circumcision does nothing to protect women from infection by men.) And the latest research, from Israel, suggests that circumcision *causes* UTIs.