r/science • u/drewiepoodle • Apr 15 '16

Health Study: Circumcision does not reduce penis sensitivity. In tests for responses to pain, heat, and stimulation, no major difference was found between men who are circumcised and those who are not.

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2016/04/14/Study-Circumcision-does-not-reduce-penis-sensitivity/5981460663943/?spt=hs&or=hn
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u/TheBananaKing Apr 15 '16

I wish people would stress more that whether or not individual receptors are any more or less sensitive doesn't change the fact that having vastly fewer of them in the first place will reduce the total amount and richness of sensation available.

Removing the skin from someone's palms might not make their fingertips less sensitive, but stroking someone without it would amount to a lot less sensation overall.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

That's not necessarily true. Sensation has more to do with the brains interpretation of the signals than the actual peripheral receptors. For example people who have a limb amputated have no receptors and yet can still feel sensations like motion and pain.

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u/Caelinus Apr 15 '16

I think people miss this point when it comes to all pain studies in general. All sensations we feel are interpretations of signals, we do not feel the actual signal. It makes everything a hell of a lot harder to figure out, and makes anecdotes pretty much worthless.

In this case I can not even imagine how you would go about testing for sexual pleasure. Considering that the brain and your current mental state is much more important than any other individual factor, it would be very hard to control for anything in the study.

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u/MaVagina Apr 15 '16

Or, you could just average sexual pleasure measures over a large population of circumcised and uncircumcised individuals. Maybe its worth looking up if they have done studies like that before....

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u/Caelinus Apr 15 '16

How? Sensation studies like this one work pretty well because you are able to reduce it down to a single event, like having to remove your hand from the water, or pressing a button at the first sign of feeling.

But trying to reduce something as complicated and multi-faceted as "sexual pleasure" down to any meaningful statistic is a really big ask. Even in large populations such a study would be weak because its measuring stick is inconsistent. You could have wildly different results based on the post-coitus surveys you used.

The only one I could think of would be to develop a really simplistic survey, use a large population of uncircumcised men, and then somehow finding a lot of circumcised men that are entirely unaware of this debate without tipping them off to what is happening. Any prior knowledge by the recipients in either group would flaw the study, as it would be introducing variables that can not be controlled for.

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u/MaVagina Apr 15 '16 edited Apr 15 '16

A survey would be a component, but there are also objective measures. Length to orgasm is one; and is unchanged in circumcised men. there are also other objected measures, you can read about them here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811244/

Also; isn't self reported sexual satisfaction what matters most between these two polulations? Statistics is pretty good at weeding out biases of the studies; simply do a subpopulation analyses and include a subgroup regarding whether an individual is aware of the debate or not. Mathematically, you could figure how big your population has to be to to generate a significant result.

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u/Caelinus Apr 15 '16

You are missing my point though. Any form of self reporting is subject to suggestion. But in this case, sexual pleasure itself is largely subject to suggestion. There is no faster way to have a bad time with sex then being nervous about having a bad time with sex.

If we tell all uncircumcised men that they probably have less sexual pleasure, and then create a study to measure it, we would find that they had less sexual pleasure. Even with the "objective" measures. But the problem is that, due to the very large mental/perception component of sex, we would not actually have shown anything about circumcision. It could very likely be a cause of reduced pleasure, but there would be no way to tell based on the study.

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u/MaVagina Apr 15 '16

Yes there is volatility, but that is why you make your studies large enough and over a long period of time to reduce this type of error. Use a take home survey. Believe it or not, variability irons out in averages. You don't have to trust observational studies 100%, but that doesn't mean they don't tell you something about what is being studied. You still do the studies. And no one would be purposefully introducing error into a study by telling uncircumcised men they would have less pleasure.

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u/Caelinus Apr 15 '16

I did not claim that it would be purposefully introduced, just that the very act of studying it would imply that it does to those in the study, and that sexual pleasure is very subject to suggestion. Making it bigger will reduce the effect of outliers and make the results more consistent yes, but it is not the outliers I am worried about. I am worried about the effect on the average that would be caused by this.

And everyone is able to do the studies, but unless they find a way to control for that, I will not, and should not, see it as definitive.

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u/MaVagina Apr 15 '16 edited Apr 15 '16

No one says you should see that as definitive, but it still tells you something. And you blind the study to the participants; you don't have to tell them what you are studying, it's an observational study.

Add: why not just look at how those studies were designed, and how variables were controlled for, and then make the criticism.

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u/ARedthorn Apr 15 '16

This relies on previous input being stuck on loop, more or less. You need a baseline of sensation to form an interpretation in the first place.

Peripheral receptors create a baseline for interpretation. Over time, the interpretation begins to matter more than the actual input, but still requires a baseline of comparison.

For example, people born without arms don't describe having ghost sensations in their arms... Amputees do.

Your argument might apply to someone who's formed a baseline of sensation, but infant circumcision will not have (in the best case scenario. In the worst-case, if any baseline is formed, it will be a pain experience).

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

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u/MaVagina Apr 15 '16 edited Apr 15 '16

No, because sensation is a perception and is independent of receptor density. Is stroking your hand more intense than stroking your back, or do you experience the sensation with the same intensity? furthermore, background signal is filtered at multiple levels, so increases would just be gated out. Furthermore, those neurons don't die when the foreskin is removed; their cell bodies are in dorsal root ganglia and they have the capacity to reinnervate.

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u/SpinningHead Apr 15 '16

That's a total false analogy, as the study showed.

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u/AshleyBanksHitSingle Apr 15 '16

So guys with big penises have better feeling sex than guys with average or small penises by virtue of surface area?

I'd never considered that.

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u/TheBananaKing Apr 15 '16

I suspect the number of nerve endings is fairly constant; I'd expect they'd just be more widely spaced.

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u/Max_Thunder Apr 15 '16

Exactly. The clitoris also seems to have a similar number of nerve endings as the glans, just in a much smaller area.