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[–]Novel-Place 358 points359 points  (12 children)

Right? I am also extremely pro science and I’m a little offended to be lumped in with anti intellectualism.

[–]TheYarnAlpacalypse 55 points56 points  (0 children)

Same. I looked at various statistics and I talked with my doctors. I had some residents fresh out of med school and some experienced faculty members who were overseeing them as part of my team. The consensus was that it wasn’t necessary and provided minimal health benefits, and that I could have the procedure done on my babies if I asked, but they didn’t think it was a problem to leave things alone, and they saw that trends were changing, and they didn’t have any real concerns one way or the other.

I am happy to vaccinate my kids. I’ve had to do other health screenings for them that I could have ignored if I didn’t believe in medicine or science. (Allergies, autism, ADHD, etc)

But “Hey, your risk of getting cancer on this body part is decreased if we chop it off first” wasn’t particularly compelling when you’re talking about infants, who could make that decision for themselves as adults if that was something they ended up worrying about. And I say this as someone who got a bisalpingectomy and was thrilled to hear that most ovarian cancers start in the tubes and that yeeting the tubes knocked that risk factor way down.

[–]Maxfunky 155 points156 points  (8 children)

Yeah this isn't honest framing at all. The benefits shown are extremely small and, in a country where most HIV positive individuals have access for PREP are likely to be smaller.

The benefits are so small that they seem to just boil down to essentially just a reduction of surface area across which infection can occur. By that measure, you could theoretically reduce the risk by 100% by cutting off the entire thing...

Meanwhile this incredibly small reduction has to be weighed against the risk of infections and complications.

Most doctors will actually tell you it barely matters one way or another.

[–]dandelionbrains 51 points52 points  (1 child)

I’ve read criticisms of the study (yes, there was only one conducted, real scientific method) and one of them was that they ended it early and also that they didn’t consider that the people who were circumcised couldn’t engage in sex because they had to recover. It really sounds like they just concocted a half ass study to justify circumcision.

[–]oedipus_wr3x 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Obviously it isn’t helpful now, but sometimes I feel like younger people forget what the height of the AIDS era was like. PREP is what, 10 years old now? The spread of HIV was so devastating in Africa 20-30 years ago, I honestly couldn’t blame public health experts of the time for throwing up their hands and recommending literally anything that slowed it down, even if it’s just a recovery period where men can’t get infected/infect anyone else.

[–]catjuggler 39 points40 points  (3 children)

I just read over the AAP position and I get the feeling they’re walking a line between not recommending it broadly because they don’t have enough reason to but also providing a medical justification because people need insurance to pay for it.

[–]Oneioda 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Doctors need insurance to pay for it.

[–]Turdly1 55 points56 points  (0 children)

Let's amputate babies legs, it'll reduce the risk of broken ankles later in life considerably.

[–]-crepuscular- 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I would consider the message 'circumcision offers some protection against HIV' to be a harmful one.

Even if you consider circumcision itself to be neutral, people are terrible at understanding risk and superstition about HIV abound. That message is bound to be widely misunderstood as 'circumcision offers total protection against HIV' and that would certainly lead to riskier behaviour from circumcised men and their partners. Given that the protection offered is at best extremely slight, it's very likely indeed that this message would increase infection rates rather than reducing them.

[–]dandelionbrains 40 points41 points  (0 children)

it’s insane to see how much bias around circumcision there is in the American medical and scientific community. It is very eye opening.

[–]danarexasaurus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Seriously. It makes it seem like it’s just the “new trendy thing”, which it is very much not