Quick question for you...

Honest question: is there any evidence that urinary tract infections, HIV, and some STDs are preventable by circumcision alone, as opposed to with proper hygiene (in the case of the first) and safe sexual practices (in the case of the second and third)? In other words if a dude keeps himself clean and practices safer sex, is he any more likely to get a UTI, HIV, or an STD if he's cut as opposed to uncut?

Well, except the for very small children in the first case, not really. There is definitely strong evidence that circumcision reduces those things, though.

But keep in mind, people often do stupid things, and also in many parts of the world people wouldn't have access to some of those things- so circumcision would still be the correct choice. Pretend it's your child: If it's likely that they will have do something stupid/have unprotected sex at some point in their life, is it better to have to say "Haha, you have HIV or an STD because you were stupid! You should have listened to meeee!" or "Good thing that you didn't get infected because I figured you would do something retarded like that and took precautions!" To go back to vaccines, I'm sure it's perfectly possible to avoid, say, whooping cough by wearing a surgical mask your entire life. Does this mean that we should have everyone wear masks all the time because we didn't want to get them vaccinated? Likewise, should we hope against hope that people everywhere will suddenly magically practice perfect hygiene and safe sex, or deal with things as they stand now?

I think you missed the part where the evidence for a medical benefit to circumcision wasn't massively compelling, or at least where you could say it was "significant" the effect didn't work out in a cost-benefit sense and you had to do some extreme data mining for it anyway.

When the scientfic and medial community looked at these "compelling" studies they found these things.

1. the studies did not follow proper protocol. They were in fact "stopped" when "good results" came up.
2. the studies massively misreported the actual benefit. They stated 40-60% likelyhood of not getting AIDS; Scientists and the medical community who are experts in statistics restated those numbers as a 2-5% improvement in prevention of aids.
3. The study's numbers have never been duplicated.
4. The studies do not apply to gay men, or men in the western world; just those is "Africa" which seems very very very odd. men are men-hiv is hiv. if it works in one country, it should work in another...
5. When you "follow the money" you find the studies funded by people who were already advocating circumcision for *religious* reasons.

finally

1. no medical consensus has ever explained the mechanism for WHY circumcision could possibly help keep you from getting aids. there are some "theories' printed, but they simply aren't compelling scientifically.

As to your main point - all else being equal, let's say there really was a reason this might be medially advised. It's medically advidse to PREVENT something that can be prevented a different way. And it's not like vaccination, or giving your child a healthy diet. It cuts part of you off. I do not see where harming little boys to *maybe* protect them from something that actual EDUCATION and condoms WILL protect them from - is a valid reason.

I joked about the fact that cutting off a teen girl's tits will insure she never gets Cancer of the mammory glands - but that doesn't strick me as a compelling reason to do it.

Well, it would be a top notch cure for breast cancer. Though you can go one further and prevent all deaths from cancer by just killing people at birth.

I was always an advocate of putting female hormones in the junior high school food, so none of the girls would get preggeres. But I'm constantly told that would be unethical.

Ethics shmethics.

Here's the thing. You're claiming that the "scientific and medical community" looked at those studies, they found them fatally flawed. If that's the case, why are all these scientific and medical organizations still advocating the practice? If the studies were fatally flawed ala Andrew Wakefield (since you claimed that they took money from religious groups with an agenda), then why haven't the scientists lost their medical licences, the studies been retracted, etc.? You're basically claiming that they are fatally flawed, positing a bunch of reasons why with no citations (and other anti-circ pages citing them don't count as citations. I want serious evidence from an unbiased, credible source showing why they are flawed), and then going off and making nonsensical analogies about cutting off breasts, which is just ridiculous- that is nothing like what I am proposing so please stop attacking strawmen.

As to "all else being equal", we'e not discussing all else being equal. We're discussing whether or not it's acceptable to use this as a way to slow the spread of a disease that is causing millions of deaths a year because evidence shows that it would help. I don't think many people would prefer to have a foreskin and also have HIV as opposed to having neither. Sure, condoms and education help better, but that is an approach that has been tried for years, and it certainly doesn't seem to be dropping transmission rates to US levels. The point is, while education may well be a "better" solution, it's also a long-term solution- and people are dying now. There's no reason why we shouldn't do everything in our power to stop deaths just because you feel a bit squeamish about it.

What medial boards are advising this? WHO is - against serious challenges from France, Germany among others.

The American Pediatrics association advises AGAINST it. Doctors without Boarders will not perform the procedure cause they disagree with the interpretations of the study.

You didn't answer any of the arguments laid against this study.

1. why are no medical professionals in agreement with how this could help?
2. Why have these studies not been replicated?
3. Why did the US (where we have circumcision) not have less AIDS than France or Germany in the 1980's before we knew anything about AIDS?

These are not trivial little "I don't like that study".

You mention vaccination. There are THOUSANDS of studies about vaccination that all agree with eachother. We know how vaccination works, and why it works. We have real time evidence that it works. WE have NONE Of that for Circumcision...

"even so, all else being equal". Ruptured appendix can and often does cause death -- why would we not agree with cutting it out before hand, to prevent it?

AGain, you want us to "take the studies" without question. But the second you start to question them, the whole thing falls apart.

Again, let's get it straight on exactly who (WHO) is advocating for this - cause it's not "all the medical community" the way vaccination is, or the way birth control is, or condom use. It's one group, following a set of studies that are challenged on so many grounds.

Until or unless those challenges can be answered, it's time to say "what's going on". I like how you belittle me as if i'm not being "skeptic" enough. What do you think reading the studies AND the challenges, and the opinions of major world orgs is doing, if not being skeptical?

I answered question #3 below- you can't just compare countries because you aren't conrolling for variables. I also proposed a solution for #1 that I've seen printed in various places, including that CDC website and the American Acadamy of Pediatrics- here's the CDC link, which includes links to dozens of studies and meta-analyses on the subject that you might want to look through.

There is no strong evidence circumcision helps ANY of this. Circumcision removes natural skin, exposes your penile head to dryness that it isn't supposed to feel.

If the "it helps with hygiene" crowd were right, then boys in europe would get more HIV, more UTI, and more std's than boys in the US. This simply is not the case. there are no more cases of STDs or UTIs in france than here, or germany than texas. And AIDS was not more prevelent in Europe than here, in the gay or straight community.

the ONLY place that has ever "proven" that circumcision was effective was AFrica. And since a human man is the same here or there, it tells me the studies are not that good.

By the way, if you *really* think it's a good idea, then do it at 16 or 18, before the kid has started having sex, but is old enough to be asked, "do you want your boy parts cut?" I'm sure they will find the studies as compelling, and the health bennies as important as you suggest they are.

One more set of facts. There's sorta a "natural study group" if you will, about circumcision and AIDS or HIV.

The US v. Europe. When I googled, I found that .3% of adult males in the US have HIV/AIDS. In France, it's .4% of adult males. In Germany .1 %, in Spain .4 %, etc. (http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-europe.htm). In the US, well over 50% of all men are circumcised. In Europe, It's less than 10% of the men. Yet the numbers of AIDS/HIV cases are pretty consistent.

That's not science. It's just sorta looking at the numbers. Again, if there really were such significant differences, given the cultural issues for the last 50 years in Europe vs. US, you'd think someone would say "oh my god, americans aren't getting UTIs".

"Circumcision removes natural skin, exposes your [glans] to dryness it isn't supposed to feel" Yes, that's the point. The explanation that I've seen is that the foreskin is susceptible to micro-tears during intercourse that create pathways for the virus. The glans is much less susceptible to these, so there aren't easy pathways for the virus to exploit. Boom, there's your "mechanism".

Keep in mind re hygiene, you're looking at national statistics, NOT a scientific study. There so many variables that aren't being controlled for that it's pretty much irrelevant. Off the top of my head, Europe has evil "socialized" medicine, which means that all socioeconomic classes get access to affordable care, so you'd expect to see lower incidence rates of STD's and UTI's than in the US, where lower classes often might not have access to good healthcare, so they would be more susceptible regardless of circumcision status, which would massively skew the data. You're absolutely right, "looking at the numbers" is not science, and it's stupid to brng up correlations or anecdotes and think that they are viable evidence to scientific studies.

"the ONLY place that has ever "proven" that circumcision was effective was AFrica" Well no shit, we're discussing this relative to Africa. People aren't dying of AIDS by the millions in the US. It's a serious problem there. It's a minor one here.

"By the way, if you *really* think it's a good idea, then do it at 16 or 18, before the kid has started having sex," Then why not wait until 16 or 18 to vaccinate them? After all, I'm sure they'd appreciate they input before looking at the evidence! We wouldn't want to unduly force people to have medical procedures as a kid, even though we do it for vaccinations and appendicitis and deformities, no, never!

BTW, you still haven't answered my original question of "where do you draw the line between "For the good of public health" and "My right to privacy trumps the medical well-being of others around me"?". Please do so, my intention in my thread was for you to answer that, not randomly spew claims on the subject.

When is it "for the public good?" When you can come up with studies that actually make sense, and are provable. Not ones that are incomplete.

the numbers of 60% are a GROSS over statement of something that *Might* be 10% but more like 2-5% (CDC by the way - it's linked on another page). I'm not going to advocate "safety" when we cannot prove this.

Give me studies that are compelling, show that micro tears really exist (the reports I've read say this is a POSSIBLE reason it works, again - it's not been studied), and give me numbers that are more compelling than 5 percent and fine - you have something. But that's not these studies.

And of course you can compare countries. If a medical procedure is effective, it's effective. Biology does not take into account, coustoms.

And again, harming the human body is NEVER an acceptable answer when you have other EVEN MORE EFFECTIVE answers.

Of course, you want to know why the "mirco tear" theory was proposed? Cause rapists who have partners that are not aroused, have to rub harder. So, are we saying that africa has a higher rape problem? of course we are. But circumcision is not the answer for that, either.

castration might be, but that's the feminist in me talking.

I mean, you can compare countries, but then you have to control for variables. If the US/Western Europe have similar rates, then you also have to account for, as I said before, the fact that WE has a far better healthcare system, so that could be skewing the numbers. If you compare the US's to Eastern Europe, which has a healthcare system much closerto the US's, then you start to see incidence rates from .4-1.2%, which are notably higher than 0.3%

Re "harming the human body"- it's not really harming. You have no memory of the pain if done in childbirth, no decline in sexual pleasure or performance, and no massive psychological trauma- in exchange for lower incidences o disease and easier hygiene. It's more like getting a nipple piercing to prevent breast cancer than getting your beasts cut off, to use your ridiculous analogy from above (Unless getting a nipple piercing is exceptionally painful, I wouldn't know).

Rape is a separate (serious) problem, let's not bring it int the discussion.