With much lamentation about circumcision on this board recently from the reluctantly aggrieved, some solace today in The New York Times. Several studies presented at an international AIDS conference last week support the protective benefit of circumcision. One study done in Kenya showed uncircumcised men to have three times the HIV risk of circumcised men over the several year course of the study. While condoms offer some protection, we know condoms are not entirely reliable, so the advice here is......snip snip.
Oh jeez, now you've done it! Superstition is gonna pop up at any second to complain about his botched circumcision and provide technical details, ad nauseum, regarding nerve endings and the like...oh, and he'll dispute the evidence presented in your link or find a way to give it a negative, anti-circumcision spin. Could this subject just go away from the boards, please?
Why? Maybe I am naive, or just kind of dumb, but I do not see why there might be a difference. More skin / flesh to get involved with bodily fluid exchange? I don't get it. Or is this like, tea drinkers are less likely to have cancer?
Nature put it there for a reason. Endless attempts at using medical reasons to justify something based on a religious superstition doesn't make sense to me. I'm snipped, my son is not. I hope that I raise him with enough sense to be careful who he sleeps with.
I agree with you, Dman. Let the child decide for himself whether he wants to mutilate his body or not when he reaches adulthood. Here's an interesting link that disputes the link between HIV and circumcision. http://www.circumstitions.com/HIV.html
The link is not very helpful. It cites a "slight" protective effect. Huh? The Kenyan study shows a 300% benefit, and other studies show similarly robust effects. With about half of kids sexually active by age 13 now, waiting until they are adults to choose for themselves is a crapshoot.
One little problem with your advice: a circ done in adulthood is a completely different recovery than when done as a newborn, I'd not wish the former on my son...
i think the evidence speaks for itself and maybe in third world countries this a good idea but in developed nations it should be needed as compulsory... use a condom!
I hope he's careful too. But the guys in the HS locker room are going to tease him and call him the headless horseman or the anteater.
That's the only thing you gleened from the link? Go re-read it... There is a ton of information there. Basically, it debunks the myth of that Kenyan study and states that it's flawed. You are correct. In adulthood, they use anesthesia and you recover with prescription drugs to manage any pain. As a baby, you receive neither. The bottom line is mutilating a child's body without their consent should be prohibited. If there was no use for the excess skin, it would not be present at birth.
Structures on the body may lose their function to the point that they are more liabilities than functional. The thymus atrophies after birth and ceases to have a useful function after childhood, the appendix is not felt to have a useful purpose in modern civilization (though may prevent infections in primitive cultures) and is more a liability for an adult than a boon (which is why it is usually removed during many laparotomies as an incidental procedure), damaged spleens from trauma probably kill more people than benefit from intact spleens, etc. And some structures are vestigial remnants of larger structures in earlier species, such as eyebrows, which are barely effective anymore in keeping things away from our eyes, and don't serve the communicative function they did before we became verbal. So the presence of a structure does not mean it continues to serve a useful function. Moreover, as our environment, including the bacterial and viral fauna, has changed over the millenia, as structure that once was useful may now increase the risk of serious illness -- like the foreskin.
Your understanding of this issue is borderline ridiculous. Newborns routinely get anesthesia for circs and typically don't require analgesia (although it is available and was routinely used before anesthesia was the norm, say about 12 years ago and earlier). If you believe that oral narcotics "manage" adult circumcision pain effectively you are in for a very large surprise postop.
plus imagine when the dude goes on his first date and whips out the anteater. The girl will laugh at him, thus damaging his physce and will become introverted start listing to goth music and drinking blood. It may bother him so much he starts dating dudes. or worse yet he might bobbitt himself as to not have to deal with the embarassment ever again. Actually if he started adting dudes his risk of HIV/Aids would greatly increase because all the studies have shown that Homosexual are more likely to get HIV than hetero dudes. So in the long run just snip it, snip it good.
