Category Archives: Behavior

Circumcision & Human Behavior

Circumcision & Human Behavior:
The emotional & behavioral effects of circumcision
by George Hill

Psychologists now recognize that male circumcision affects emotions and behavior. This article discusses the impact of male circumcision on human behavior.

Introduction

Medical doctors adopted male circumcision from religious practice into medical practice in England in the 1860s and in the United States in the 1870s. No thought was given to the possible behavioral effects of painful operations that excise important protective erogenous tissue from the male phallus. For example, Gairdner (1949) and Wright (1967), both critics of male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision, made no mention of any behavioral effects of neonatal circumcision.[1] [2]

The awakening

Other doctors, however, were beginning to express concern about the behavioral effects of male circumcision. Read the rest of this entry »

Genital cutting tied to later abuse risk

And remember, dear friends… anything that affects a female who has been cut surely will affect a cut male as well. Trauma is trauma. And the worst part of circumcision is not the physical cut, but the psychological repercussions. Spare the child and he or she will grow up to be far more peaceful, trusting, happy than someone who has been grievously injured unnecessarily due to fashion, superstition or any other adult fear.

By Amy Norton, Reuters
September 24, 2012

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who underwent genital cutting as young girls may be at increased risk of physical, sexual or emotional abuse from their husband, a study of women in Mali suggests.

The study, of nearly 7,900 women, found that 22 percent of those with genital mutilation said they’d been physically abused by a husband or male partner. That compared with 12 percent of women who’d never been subjected to the procedure.

It’s estimated that more than 130 million women worldwide have undergone genital mutilation, also known as female “circumcision.” The centuries-old practice, which involves removing part or all of a girl’s clitoris and labia, and sometimes narrowing the vaginal opening, remains a common practice in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s well-known that genital cutting has long-term consequences for women – including sexual dysfunction, childbirth complications, incontinence and psychological disorders.

In the new study, researchers looked at whether there’s a link between genital mutilation and a woman’s odds of suffering abuse from her partner.

In Mali, where the vast majority of women have undergone genital mutilation, the government has taken steps to raise awareness of the consequences of the practice. But genital mutilation has not been outlawed.

The difficulty is that genital cutting is widely seen as an important cultural tradition, rather than a form of abuse.

“If something is entrenched in a culture, it is difficult to change,” said Dr. Hamisu Salihu of the University of South Florida in Tampa, the lead researcher on the new study.

On the other hand, physically abusing your wife – though common in Mali and other African countries – does not have that cultural acceptance, Salihu told Reuters Health…

READ MORE: YAHOO! Health

SOURCE: BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, online August 24, 2012

Food & Behavior – A Natural Connection

“No illness which can be treated by diet
should be treated in any other manner.”
Maimonaides

I love the book, Food & Behavior – A Natural Connection by Barbara Reed Stitt. It is so sane. The quality of food one ate used to be considered irrelevant. If you had a full stomach, you were supposed to be ok. But it has been proven that people who eat manufactured foods (or who don’t eat at all) cannot think clearly, do not feel good, and they behave in ways that are not healthy for themselves and society, while people who are fed high quality foods think clearly, are healthy, feel good and behave accordingly.

In the videos below, you can see how essential good nutrition is in schools. The happy results of a healthy diet are increased alertness, improved behavior, better scholarship, reduced antisocial behavior, vandalism, fights, dropouts and suicides. School budgets benefit too!

“We’ve got to stop using our most precious commodity – our kids – to make extra money.”


Risks, Benefits, Complications and Harms: Neglected Factors in the Current Debate on Non-Therapeutic Circumcision

Excerpt from an article by Robert Darby, published by Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal Vol. 25, No. 1, 1–34 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Emphasis added by this website.

It is a sign of the increasingly controversial status of routine circumcision that the American Academy of Pediatrics policy released in August 2012 attracted strong dissent, not merely from long-standing critics of circumcision, but from previously uncommitted child health experts in Europe as well. The scale of the dissent is all the more striking given that the policy differs little from the quietly received 1989 statement (which found that circumcision had potential benefits, but not enough to justify it as a routine) or even the 1999 statement, which reached a neutral stance and left it up to the parents. The only major difference in the new policy is that while it continues not to recommend circumcision, it states that the benefits outweigh the risks and are great enough to authorize parental decision-making and payments by health insurance providers. Although this is largely a continuation of the status quo, it is precisely on these points that objections have fallen most heavily.

According to the critics, the AAP policy is flawed because it does not establish that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risk and does not justify its secondary (but unrelated) contention that the decision about whether a boy should be circumcised should be made by his parents. While the brief (widely quoted) statement asserts that “the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks” the lengthy (but less readily available) report acknowledges that

The true incidence of complications after newborn circumcision is unknown, in part due to differing definitions of “complication” and differing standards for determining the timing of when a complication has occurred (ie, early or late). Adding to the confusion is the comingling of “early” complications, such as bleeding or infection, with “late” complications such as adhesions and meatal stenosis.

In its reply to their critics, the AAP admitted that it had not surveyed the literature of complications case reports, but added that the benefits of circumcision “were felt to outweigh the risks of the procedure” (AAP Task Force on Circumcision 2013).

“…had not surveyed the literature… benefits… were felt to outweigh the risks…? Surely real scientists would actually study the subject before expressing their feelings! Oh, ethics! Oh, evidence-based medicine, wherefore art thou? How revealing and how embarrassing for them that they did not bother to study the complications case reports. “Don’t confuse us with the facts,” head-buried-in-sand ostrich behavior here – and so, children continue to be tortured and traumatized by people masquerading as “healing professionals”.

Read the full article and save it to your computer if you wish: Risks, Benefits, Complications and Harms: Neglected Factors in the Current Debate on Non- Therapeutic Circumcision

Why Are the Japanese so Healthy?

Hippocrates said thousands of years ago, “Let food be your medicine and medicine your food.”

Most people forgot that simple bit of wisdom, but in the 1940s when there was no medicine for hypertension and kidney disease, one brave doctor, Walter Kempner, devised a rice diet that worked on his patients… and it worked to heal many other diseases (including obesity) as well!  Voila! The origins of food as medicine in our modern age.

Here, Dr. Frank Neelon, a student of Dr. Kempner’s talks about the diet. He seems to still be astonished at the effects of the rice diet on other problems, but it makes sense to me that simplifying one’s diet – eating only whole, natural foods – would benefit the entire body – and the mind as well.  See my review of “Food & Behavior”, a wonderful book on the subject.

Circumcision & Human Behavior

The emotional & behavioral effects of circumcision
by George Hill

Psychologists now recognize that male circumcision affects emotions and behavior. This article discusses the impact of male circumcision on human behavior.

Introduction

Medical doctors adopted male circumcision from religious practice into medical practice in England in the 1860s and in the United States in the 1870s. No thought was given to the possible behavioral effects of painful operations that excise important protective erogenous tissue from the male phallus. For example, Gairdner (1949) and Wright (1967), both critics of male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision, made no mention of any behavioral effects of neonatal circumcision.[1] [2]

The awakening

Other doctors, however, were beginning to express concern about the behavioral effects of male circumcision. Continue reading Circumcision & Human Behavior

Food & Behavior – A Natural Connection

“No illness which can be treated by diet should be treated in any other manner.”
Maimonaides

I love the book, Food & Behavior – A Natural Connection by Barbara Reed Stitt. It is so sane. The quality of food one ate used to be considered irrelevant. If you had a full stomach, you were supposed to be ok. But it has been proven that people who eat manufactured foods (or who don’t eat at all) cannot think clearly, do not feel good, and they behave in ways that are not healthy for themselves and society, while people who are fed high quality foods think clearly, are healthy, feel good and behave accordingly.

In the videos below, you can see how essential good nutrition is in schools. The happy results of a healthy diet are increased alertness, improved behavior, better scholarship, reduced antisocial behavior, vandalism, fights, dropouts and suicides. School budgets benefit too!

“We’ve got to stop using our most precious commodity – our kids – to make extra money.”