Prostate Cancer? Yet Another Bogus Justification for Circumcision

[SoCo Intactivists]

In a strange way, this is actually a good sign. It shows how desperate the pro-circumcision nuts have gotten and how biased the medical journals are toward propping up this senseless, harmful, obsolete cultural custom.

Once again, for-profit medicine is not working in your -- or your child's -- best interest.

https://intactamerica.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/prostate-cancer-yet-another-bogus-justification-for-circumcision/

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Prostate Cancer? Yet Another Bogus Justification for Circumcision

March 14, 2012

As more and more Americans realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods about circumcision, and as fewer parents are willing to allow their sons to be tied down and mutilated for a fee, physicians and others with a financial or psychological interest struggle to find new reasons for promoting the Great American Rip-Off .

This week’s example comes via an article published in the journal Cancer (https://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-102757.html), which describes a “statistical sampling” study leading to the conclusion that circumcision may lead to lower prostate cancer rates. “Circumcision,” the study claims, “can hinder infection and inflammation that may lead to this malignancy.”

I could say a lot about this “study,” but in the interest of brevity and timeliness, I will limit myself to the following:

First, the authors relied on self-reporting for circumcision status, history of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and age at first intercourse. Self-reports about disease history and sexual behavior are inherently problematic. Self-reports about circumcision status have been shown repeatedly to have a high error rate of +/- 5 percent, or enough to nullify any statistical significance claimed in the study.

Second, the body of medical literature does not support the claim for a lower rate of STDs in circumcised men—either in the United States or abroad. In response to the new study, Medscape News (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/760067) (login required, free registration) interviewed independent physicians regarding the report in Cancer. Siobhan Sutcliffe, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine, noted that results from a self-reporting, case-control study are much less reliable than those from a clinical trial. “It is too early to make recommendations about circumcision for prostate cancer prevention,” she said. “More and different types of studies need to be done before a preventive recommendation can be put forward.” Anthony Y. Smith, MD, Professor and Chief of Urology in the Department of Surgery at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, also noted that it is “extremely difficult to evaluate the effect of circumcision on a wider geographic scale outside of a controlled clinical trial.” As he mentions, the prevalence of prostate cancer and sexually transmitted infections is similar in the United States, where circumcision is common, to that in Western Europe, where it is not.

Finally, the authors themselves admit that the exact mechanism through which circumcision might prevent prostate cancer remains unknown. Thus, their hypothesis that the foreskin is the cancer-causing culprit requires us to accept that “germs flourishing in the moist environment under the foreskin” somehow make their way into the prostate and cause cancer. Without actual, clinical proof of this, the giddiness regarding one more justification for circumcision is inappropriate—to say the least.

The real lesson here is that current science and news publications set the bar far higher for studies showing the risks and harms of circumcision than they do for lame, unfounded claims touting the “benefits” of removing healthy body parts from babies who are many years away from being sexually active. (And, by the way, whatever happened to condoms, which protect both males and females?) For the promoters of infant circumcision, it appears to be a fact-free, evidence-free environment.

Current estimates of boys leaving the hospital intact range from 33 to 54.5 percent, up from a rate of just 10 percent in the 1960s. It is disheartening that the medical establishment promotes the bogus science, ignores the ethics, and continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel for reasons to keep cutting babies. However, parents are seeing beyond the smoke and mirrors and are getting wise to the Great American Rip-Off.

Georganne Chapin

[pamelaL]

True stories and musings from an underground RN

In 1970, at age 19, my rotation through obstetrics as a student nurse began. I spent time in all the departments of labor and delivery, including the newborn nursery. One very early morning, my assignment to observe a circumcision came about. The room felt very cold and the baby boy had only a thin cotton t-shirt pulled up to his armpits to keep him warm. The regular nurse had strapped him spread eagle to a shiny, bare board and rushed off. Assigned to just stand by, I felt alone and helpless. The newborn cried pitifully under the harsh bright lights and I wanted to comfort him; but I could not. With his bare little arms and legs firmly restrained and his tiny, perfect body almost completely naked, I looked for a blanket but found none. Time moved slowly waiting for the doctor. When the doctor rushed in, I felt shocked to see him in dirty surgical scrubs with a stubbed out cigar clenched in his teeth. His unsanitary condition and his cigar appalled me, as did his odor. I felt astonished and rudely rousted from some of my young, idealistic assumptions. Shy and speechless, I stared at him as he glanced at me and grunted. I watched as he mechanically worked; fast like he could do this with his eyes closed. He grabbed the boys’ penis, quickly forced a wooden ring under the foreskin, then placed an outer ring over that and crushed the foreskin off. It only took a moment but the baby reacted violently with an increasing volume of desperate crying. At the moment of crushing he let out a piercing scream as his body stiffened and arched fully off the board. His face, neck and upper body turned red just before he ran out of breath and swooned, hiccoughing and gulping. In shock I actually spoke up to this doctor and demanded of him “how can you think he does not feel that?” The doctor answered without even a glance at me, “Bahhh, he won’t remember it.” These days, people understand how to access cellular memory of prenatal and infant life using holotropic breath work and more; the body remembers everything. Now, working as a therapist and movement educator, I see that same pattern of rigid extension in the postures unconsciously held by many a man and think of the circumcision injury I had witnessed. I become philosophical as I contemplate the overview of our world and the human species. What imprint of helplessness and injury continue in the male psyche? In light of the balance of the yin/yang symbol, I find the practice of circumcision particularly worrisome. Our culture wants the moist dark feminine yin on a man, cut away. In some places in the world, even in the USA, the yang of the clitoris is cut away from girls.

Years later when I had my own son and took him for his first pediatric exam, three weeks after our home birth, the doctor informed us that no medical reason existed for circumcision. This doctor continued to threaten us however, and tell us our son would have greater chances of disease and more if we did not have him circumcised, which I knew as simply not true. I later read where a market exists for foreskins used in the manufacture of burn dressings and cosmetics. I have no right to decide to make this sort of bodily alternation on someone else. We do not possess our children but only care for them for a time.

I wrote the above for The Sun magazine some time ago, it was not accepted for publication. It is true to every detail. I was also told by a lover long ago, that to care for a healthy foreskin, all a man needs to do is once every so often, depending, gently hold the end of the foreskin closed and urinate, then release, repeat a couple of times; the urine is the perfect pH, and sterile, and rinses out the natural accumulation of cells keeping everything balanced. As an RN, this makes sense to me.

[Dixon]

Here I'll chime in that soap and water works just fine for cleansing under the foreskin, no problem.

[wildflower]

Both of my boys were born at home and WERE NOT circumcised and they are beautiful, healthy adults now and are just fine. The oldest is 40.
I think circumcision was designed for certain circumstances that no longer apply to most situations. It is no longer helpful or necessary.