Circumstraint
This
is an emotional issue for me. When
I was
in training, we did lot’s of circumcisions.
We gave careful instructions to parents about how much
bleeding to
expect. But the
highly absorbent diapers
that had just just come on the market hid the amount of bleeding one
boy
had. His parents
brought in him back to
the ER in shock a few days later.
He had
almost bled to death. He
was a
hemophiliac – no family history.
Sometimes this occurs as a new mutation. He survived but
his ghost
hovered above every subsequent case I performed.
I had to ask myself this, “Exactly why are we
doing this?”
Children
are very malleable. Evolution
has
programmed them to pay very close attention to the cues in the
environment that
tell them what the world is like and how to be successful in it. By birth, scientists now
understand, we have
already been “programmed” for things like famine
resistance, anxiety threshold
and various preferences ( music, flavors, etc.)
Imagine
the experience of being strapped to a table, injected with chemicals
and left
with a raw wound on one of the most neurologically sensitive parts of
your
body. Even
with perfect anesthesia
which is itself painful to produce, there is undoubtedly pain with
urination
for a few days. Think
about trust issues
to a young being trying to figure out if their universe is safe
The
medical justifications for circumcision are thin.
Preventing penile cancer, the last scientific
justification, has melted away since the HPV vaccine has become routine
for
boys. Rates dropped
to around 30% in
most states by 2010. That
is still too
many. We should stop doing circumcision except where it is a religious
freedom
issue.
Materials: I acquired the
Circumstraint device from my
old medical practice when they were acquired.
It is the same device I used in the few circumcisions I
performed after
training. The ghost
genitalia were part
of the packaging from some big box store purchase that whispered
“keep me” and
I always obey such impulses if space permits.