A 9 week old baby boy in Britain died after circumcision. According to an article in the Times, the baby boy underwent the surgery in a physician’s clinic (surgery) in Reading, England. There have been 3 reported deaths from circumcision in Britain in the past 24 months. Most people don’t realize that there is no blood testing done on infant boys before this amputation is done to see if they are hemophiliac. It would be a simple matter to test the clotting ability of the infant’s blood but it’s just not done.
It’s interesting to note that England is a non-circumcising culture and has been since an article appeared in a British medical journal in the late 1940s. So, if a non-circumcising (cutting boys’ genitals is rare and limited to religious circumcision of Muslims and Jews) country (the UK) has public reports of 3 baby deaths in a 24 month period, there must be many more in a country like the USA where 56% of boys are still cut. There is a curtain of secrecy around these tragic cases in the U.S. The parents don’t talk because they are so embarrassed and in shock. The hospital staff stonewall to protect each other from litigation.
There are plans afoot right now to create a method whereby whistleblowers can contact the press without being identified. This is how circumcision was taken off the Medical Plans right across Canada. There is now no public funding of genital cutting in Canada. 16 U.S. states have cut funding but we still need to stop funding in all the rest. In Canada, hospital workers started calling the press when a baby died from circumcision or when there were the inevitable “mixups” of boys. Once it all came out in the open, the rates went down very quickly.
When adult hospital workers, parents, family members and others in the community start speaking up for baby boys who can’t speak for themselves, the U.S. rate of male genital mutilation will drop below 10% very quickly. Please find the courage to speak up.
Gloria Lemay, Vancouver BC Canada �
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What a tragedy, completely unnecessary. Of course even when the circumcision “goes well”, the loss of sensitive sexual tissue in these future men is quite damaging in itself.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/04/MNDN168MCO.DTL&hw=doctor+critics&sn=005&sc=547
Some doctors have started fighting back against ugly Internet reviews by asking patients to abide by what are effectively gag orders that bar them from posting negative comments online.
Physicians are taking action as online ratings services such as Yelp and Angie’s List grow in popularity and expand their reviews beyond restaurants and plumbers to include medical care, joining dedicated Web sites such as RateMDs.com.
“Consumers and patients are hungry for good information” about doctors, but Internet reviews provide just the opposite, contends Dr. Jeffrey Segal, a North Carolina neurosurgeon who has made a business of helping doctors monitor and prevent online criticism.
Some sites “are little more than tabloid journalism without much interest in constructively improving practices,” and their sniping comments can unfairly ruin a doctor’s reputation, Segal said.
For a fee, Segal’s company, Medical Justice, provides doctors with a standardized waiver agreement. Patients who sign agree not to post online comments about the doctor, “his expertise and/or treatment.” (snip)
If a doctor I went to gave me a paper to sign saying to not post comments about them online, I would assume that the doctor is a quack and run out of that office immediately (and then post my experience on ratemds.com) 😉
I doubt Jeffrey Segal’s form is legally enforceable. Especially given the options to post under a pseudonym. One day, an outfit like Kaiser will sue an ISP over this.
One of the really convincing reasons Gairdner gave for halting RIC in the UK is that the number of babies killed by RIC was running 10-15/year. This in a society where the circ rate never reached 50%! (Everyday unsophisticated British families always resisted circ.)
So infant circ is now quite rare, but we are still seeing 1.5 deaths/year in the UK! Part of the problem is that British doctors are not as competent or as careful as American ones. For one thing, they can’t be sued, only prosecuted for manslaughter. I would not be surprised if the circumstraint board is not standard, and most circs are still done freehand.
I bet the death rate from RIC in the USA and Canada is higher than people think, and has been suppressed. The only cases you and I know about are those that lead to a lawsuit being filed. The rational thing to do is to hire a lawyer, who writes a letter to the hospital where a circ death occured. The hospital’s insurer settles out of court, in exchange for the parents signing a gag order. The death certificate for the baby boy ducks the truth.
I’ve been an intactivist since reading Wallerstein in 1983. I grew up intact in the USA, and that wasn’t ideal. There are sexual aspects of intactness that I did not discover until my 40s and 50s. I discovered your name and blog only today. I enjoy interacting with women intactivists, and am deeply moved at how they emotionally understand something so utterly masculine. (The female analog to American RIC would be to have your inner lips cut off without anesthesia. Women readers out there, are you hearts in your throats and is your blood pressure rising? And well it should!) My fellow men? Either they are in denial about the sexual consequences of circ, or they are dysfunctionally angry about what was done to them.
When I suggest to a Mom that she leave her infant son intact and she disagrees with me, we remain on speaking terms. When I suggest to a father and he disagrees with me, and can mean an end to our friendship. He suspects me of fetishism and perversion over his child.