Male Circumcision

Female circumcision is different than male circumcision. If it is done to females, all of the sensitivity is gone and there are none whatsoever. Men who are circumsized still are able to be sexually healthy and have no issue with their life. My bf kinda wishes to be circumsized although I don' t think the pain would be worth it. He wishes because the skin that attatches to the head makes it hurts to pull down a bit when pulled down a little bit further. I mean I think it's normal but he hates it. Also, guys who are uncut tend to be very sensitive which makes them easier to "finish" much faster than they wish.

I actually had an ex who was cut. My uncut bf's hygiene is WAY better and so does the taste lol

 

Do you actually have a stance for or against male circumcision? Or are you saying that it's ok for men to be circumcised and not women because it's worse for women?

 

.

 

Interesting article. But the following doesn't seem correct, does it?

 

I've heard similar numbers other places, actually higher now that I think about it. Some viral infections are ubiquitous (or nearly so) in certain populations.

Here is another very common virus

Human herpesvirus 6 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Interesting piece of news, this here.

Male Circumcision

Found the above report through this article: BBC News - Germany Jews and Muslims protest at circumcision ruling

 

Urinary tract infections = cranberry juice and washing
Acquisition of HIV = condoms, monogamy, and unbiased studies would be better
Transmission of some sexually transmitted infections = condoms, monogamy, vaccines
Penile cancer = very rare, probably due to HPV or some other virus. And it effects older men.

Male circumcision does not appear to adversely affect penile sexual function/sensitivity or sexual satisfaction = It might not adversely affect it, but it does change it.

It is a religious thing now, where all three major religions are for it, the doctors and hospitals get to charge hundreds of dollars for the surgery, and in South America, Asia, and Europe they don't seem to be having that much of a problem with the foreskin. There is no real reason to have it done.

 

I take the recommendations of the AAP very seriously. I first saw a report on this about a week ago(?) , but haven't gone through it all yet. One of the things that put me off about it was when they mentioned the 60% reduction in HIV study that I know has problems. Of course, that was just one study and there are at least 10 others cited related to STIs. I'll have to look at those too.

 

Have they ever done studies on large college campuses using male college age students in the USA vs Europe. That is what I want to see. They don't even have to go to Europe, there are enough uncircumcised guys in the US that they should be able to get a few thousand to provide their STI history. Then again, maybe the UK or Canada would be a more impartial setting for this study. Also get the real number of sex partners and how often condoms were used to see how much that factors in.

 

Maybe the uncut dudes just have more sex

 

None of the studies I've seen have taken that into account. They also haven't taken how monogamous/disease-free their partners have been either. It is hard to catch HIV or and STI from a partner that doesn't have it.

 

Yeah it's pretty clear that the studies are just a load of bunk. Clear to me anyway. And the fact would remain that even among uncut dudes most people simply don't have HIV anyway.

 

If only the peer review process could somehow take into account the opinion of random dudes on the internet. Maybe WHO should set up a reddit-like system where only the papers that make it onto the front page become official science.

 

It is called the scientific method. Their results need to be repeatable in the 1st world population to be taken as fact. Until then, the methods they used and the sensationalist headlines after a few weeks (and the percentage would have dropped had they continues for the full year because it was trending that way) leads to problems trusting medical researchers and scientists. They should be trying to find the truth, not what they want the results to be.

 

So you're saying that biology in third world countries isn't the same as in first world countries? I don't know about that.

There are reasons that circumcision might not be the most effective and/or viable method for reducing STI spread in certain first world countries, but these reasons probably in no way imply that the results of multiple randomized clinical trials in third world countries are invalid.

You can recognize that circumcision can have a reductive effect on the spread of STIs without having to endorse circumcision.

 

Why are there so many STIs in the USA then? Their 50-60% reduction headline wouldn't have been as impressive if they had run the test the original 12 months and found that instead of 10 uncircumcised to 5 circumcised out of 2500 getting HIV, it could have been 25 to 20 and only been 20%. Or one group might just be a little more unlucky and sleep with a few more HIV infected prostitutes and changed that number. They should have at least waited for the newly circumcised guys to fully heal before starting tracking STI infections. I will give them that it has a reductive effect for the 6 weeks or so of healing if the surgery is performed in adulthood.

They are using this 'data' collected in the third world and trying to write policies in the first world. They need to do some real world data mining to see if their hypothesis has played out with the pro-circumcision policy in the US from 1945-1990.

 

Last I checked, there were three RCTs which showed a protective effect for circumcision with respect to the spread of HIV. Which one are you concerned with?

Here's how Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs) work. They're actually a lot more complicated than this, but for the purposes of this discussion, the following is true: Generally, RCTs require the approval of organizations called Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). It's the IRB's responsibility to ensure that the human subjects are being treated according to ethical and humane guidelines. Before any treatment is administered, before any foreskin is shorn, before subjects are even recruited, IRBs require that researchers demonstrate something called equipoise, which is essentially the notion that the effects of the treatment under study (here circumcision) are not known conclusively to be better or worse than the effects of the control (here, no circumcision). Without equipoise, there's no point in doing an RCT because we already know what the results will be.

RCTs are expensive, and IRBs are strict, as they should be, and so RCTs are usually designed so that at specific points along the way data are analyzed to see whether equipoise still plausibly exists, and if at one of these points the data suggest that a true difference in effect between treatment and control have been found, where true-ness is defined by the arcane particulars of statistics, then the trial is stopped. This is standard practice. This is why the hormone therapy arm of the Women's Health Initiative was stopped ahead of schedule: it turns out hormone therapy is actually bad for a lot of women. It wasn't the result of a conspiracy against the use of horse-urine in medication, it was the result of due diligence and ethical behavior.

Are studies stopped early by mistake (or by pharmaceutical companies trying to protect their bottom line)? Yes. It's bound to happen. That's why research requires replication to achieve credibility. Have there been multiple studies supporting a protective effect for circumcision? Yes. Does it make any sense to harp on one study, which was stopped early for what appear to be perfectly valid reasons because you personally don't like that study's conclusion? No. Especially not if the only way you can use the fact that this one study was stopped early to support your position is to completely ignore the existence of other studies which undermine your position.

As for the STI rates in the US, note the phrase 'protective effect' is not the same as 'invincibility effect'. Circumcision isn't 100% effective. I don't recall the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that it was on the small side of 60%. Either way, even if it were 20%, if circumcision were embraced en masse, the result would be fewer new HIV infections. Is circumcision better than a condom? No. No one is saying it is.

Why? I mean, it would be nice to have more evidence, but even if effects weren't statistically significant under your seemingly arbitrary time and geographical constraints, that wouldn't necessarily undermine the research that already exists. The only type of study that could be conducted on things that have happened in the past is pretty far down the totem pole of credibility compared to the RCTs performed in Africa. Your study would be a pair of tens, while the Africa studies are full houses.

 

And since no long-term effect was studied, the best they can say is that in the short term, that circumcision has an effect. Yes, studies are expensive. But getting it wrong, and having to tell the people 30-40 years from now that it doesn't have as big of an effect as was stated is a bigger problem. Especially when the time and money could be better spent finding a vaccine (although whether they would release it is another thread topic).

You don't see climate researchers only do a temperature study from April-July and stop it early because we have to prevent the temperature from doubling again by December.

At least do a study of men infected with HIV/AIDS to see if accounting for the ratio of uncircumcised vs circumcised men in a first world city, if there is a difference between HIV rates to suggest that more uncircumcised men are infected.

 

You should look into what's actually been done before you offer any more criticism. So far, your concerns have only betrayed your lack of awareness about the relevant details of the research.


Climate science and epidemiology aren't easily comparable for many reasons. With respect to HIV, the time scales are different, and this is reflected in the research. Climate changes occur over the course of decades, centuries, etc. HIV develops over the course of months.


Again, all of the first world research you're suggesting would have less credibility than the three existing RCTs, and so wouldn't mean what you want it to mean. No one is going to sink money into research that is less credible than the research that already exists.