Sunday, May 01, 2011

I Was Traumatized By My Circumcision...


Years ago I read about the crazy positive effects in HIV prevention from merely circumcising the at-risk population.

I said to a friend the other day, one who's CRAZY HEALTH-CONSCIOUS (raw food, no vaccines, etc.), and who has three young boys, "What do you think about circumcision?"

I knew what was coming...

"Oh it's awful!...", blah, blah, blah. She did not have her boys' boys mutilated.

Then I threw the African AIDS circumcision study at her. Surprisingly she had never heard of it.

I did some more Googling and came across that dude above earlier today. Now a lot of what he says is laced with elitism ("They are so dumb they will think they don't have to use condoms....the disease will spread more.") and stupidity ("We have to develop a vaccine...").

I still don't know. My foreskin is long gone (my balls are occasionally MIA too) and my only son was snipped upon birth and he seems to be over the trauma of it now. So the issue is personally moot.

But while these healthy people, the ones who eat crazy food and eschew all chemicals and medicine and whatnot, definitely make a whole lot of trenchant points....I just think they go a little overboard sometimes.

I mean there's no incentive for doctors to push circumcision. There's no Big Pharma conflict of financial interest. On the contrary, in the case of fighting AIDS in Africa the circumcision results should all but end the multi-billion dollar Big Pharma boondoggle that is government-subsidized HIV research. See my post from 5 years ago - Medical Morons.

Of course money isn't the only thing that corrupts - bad ideas can triumph through sheer inertia.

Someone, a non-blood relative, told me years ago that the only reason Americans are generally circumcised is because all the doctors here are/were Jewish. And it had something to do with identifying Jews by their penises during the Holocaust. Whatever.


Oh...now I remember!

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