Phantom Penis

A recent blog entry directed me to this paper by Namba et al. titled Phantom erectile penis after sex reassignment surgery. The paper describes a variation of the phantom limb phenomenon, in where several of their patients experienced an erect  phantom penis after their male-to-female vaginoplasty. Most of them lost this sensation after a few weeks, but for one patient the condition persisted for 6 months (and the phantom penis was constantly erect for the whole period). The surgeons were using a new variant of the standard vaginoplasty, in where they use skin from the scrotal sac to make the interior walls of the vagina, instead of skin from the penis. This meant that both the bulbospongiosus muscle and the corpus cavernosum were left in place, and the surgeons theorized that these elements might be the cause of the patients sensation. So, they did another operation where they removed both of these structures, and this did indeed cause the patients phantom penis to disappear. According to neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran, the persistence of a phantom penis in male-to-female transsexuals is a very rare occurrence, because their brains are most likely hard wired for female genitalia.

Welcome

Welcome to Medescape!

I’ve thought about starting a blog for some time now, and finally got around to do it. My plan is to mainly write about medicine and science news, but other stuff might slip in also if I feel like it.  I’ll try to post something every day, but since I’m currently in what I like to call the prime of my life (ie a student), I’ll have to spend a lot of time at the university library preparing for my exams… Oh, wait, did i say exam preparations? I of course meant partying like crazy…ish…ehm… 

 

So, since it’s kinda lateish, I’ll just start off with some light reading. For a first post, I imagine this is perfect. What can I say, it’s medicine, a bit of science and a lot of other stuff in one article! So basically a man having a circumcision woke up without his penis. Sounds terrible, but it turned out the doctors discovered a life-threatening tumor during his surgery, and decided to just chop it of when he was under. Still, I think that in hindsight, it might have been a better idea to wake him up and inform the guy before removing his whole thing. It all depends on how the surgeons evaluated the tumor however, but the article doesn’t really give that many details about this aspect. 

And this being in America, the guy naturally sued the doctors. At least this is a little worse than some light burns from a, go figure, hot cup of Starbucks coffee…