You think Seasonal Affective Disorder is some made up ailment by sympathy seeking friends? Then you probably won’t believe in Post-Orgasmic Illness Syndrome, a condition describing men who are allergic to their own semen. After ejaculating, men with POIS suffer flu-like symptoms, including running a temperature, itchy eyes, and a runny nose — all of which can last for a week. Physicians who initially believed the issue was psychosomatic might be convinced by the skin-prick allergy test that showed 88 percent of 33 men sampled showed positive allergic results.
Sean
I’d be a bit skeptical about this supposed cause of the disease. Semen is a mixture of several fluids, all of which exist to some degree in the body before ejaculation. They have no clear mechanism for ejaculation increasing exposure, and no idea what substance is actually being reacted to in the semen. They also have a small sample size, and the both studies are clearly vulnerable to confirmation bias and placebo effects. We’ll see where this hypothesis stands in a few years.
George
Stupid.
Semen is basic.
Basic=caustic, like soap.
Of course it’s going to irritate your skin if you leave soap on it.
The question of whether there is such a thing as POIS is debatable, but the skin test is a stupid way of trying to prove it.
iriemage
I get hives if it is on me for too long, I don’t know if I’m allergic to semen or if it is just irritating my skin.
John P
Sean,
“Semen is a mixture of several fluids, all of which exist to some degree in the body before ejaculation…”
Yes but since meiosis is in place the immune system does not have access to the tubing were sperm is built and stored… Therefore it is conceivable that you could be allergic to you own sperm as it does not posses the same genetic code as your own and could be considered foreign and cause an allergic reaction when it touches your skin.
Sceth
Just eat it.
Silver
@John P: “Yes but since meiosis is in place the immune system does not have access to the tubing were sperm is built and stored…”
That’s the most asinine statement I’ve ever seen. You may as well say that a person could be allergic to their own blood because the immune system does not have access to the inner walls of the blood vessels. I’m no doctor, but every place in your body is connected to your immune system. Even by that standard, there should be some kind of reaction within the urethra itself once the semen comes in contact with it, not flu symptoms.
Jeffree
I must be lucky — never had any bad reaction to my semen or anyone else’s. Futher research [by me] will need to be conducted :-}
I’ve heard about these allergic reactions from women who sleep w/ men, too, BTW.
Sean
“Yes but since meiosis is in place the immune system does not have access to the tubing were sperm is built and stored… Therefore it is conceivable that you could be allergic to you own sperm as it does not posses the same genetic code as your own and could be considered foreign and cause an allergic reaction when it touches your skin.”
a) Part of the reason I took issue with the study is that they /don’t/ know what substance in semen is being reacted to, so even if the conclusion happens to be correct, we have no way of knowing whether or not sperm cells have anything to do with it.
b) The immune system has no more access to the surface of one’s skin than to sperm within the testis. In fact, I would be astonished if sperm were more likely to penetrate skin than the blood-testis barrier (though the mucus membranes are another possibility, but since there was no thoroughness to the research at all we are stuck speculating). There are a lot of other substances, even in semen, which can more easily penetrate the skin or various mucus membranes. In fact, in known cases of semen allergy, it is proteins within seminal fluid which are thought to usually be the problem, not sperm cells.
c) The skin prick paper is exactly the kind of medical research that you get when doctors are excited about promoting a pet hypothesis. It can lead to useful results, but it’s just preliminary, and most studies of this size either are never replicated because they are outdated by better explanations, or are retested and turn out to be outright wrong. There was a small sample size. There was no control group (How common are false positives for skin prick tests with autologous semen? Did the same doctors try this on anyone who doesn’t have POIS?). There was very little narrowing down of possible mechanisms. And the reported symptoms of the disease were just generic allergy symptoms, which means that it’s quite possible that they were common and associated with something else, but that the patient for whatever reason decided to associate those symptoms with orgasm (a belief which could easily be reinforced and exaggerated by confirmation bias and the placebo effect). It’s especially suspicious that the most vague or subjective symptoms were the most common (exhaustion and concentration difficulties, flu-like).
d) The physicians involved then attempted hyposensitization therapy to fix the supposed allergy, to publish in another paper. They picked two patients (only two! Two!) and had them come in for injections every 2-4 weeks, again without controls, guaranteeing an unknown and possibly very large contribution from placebo effects, confirmation bias, regression to the mean, and changes in subjective reporting. You can get positive results for any treatment method that way; this is in fact precisely the sort of study regularly used to promote sham/scam treatments that accomplish nothing at all, by alternative health quacks and avaricious pharmaceutical companies alike. (Although the latter, at least, have more regulations and hoops to jump through.)
After three whole years, during which any number of things could have changed due to the treatment or other life events, including sexual habits, general health, allergens they were regularly exposed to, and any number of psychological factors, the patients happened to feel much better than the period in their lives when they felt so bad that they had to go to the doctor. And then the physicians have the gall to confidently declare that they were “successfully treated”, as if they have any way at all of knowing whether the semen exposure actually did anything. This does not inspire confidence. It’s just a particularly uninformative case study; I’m disappointed that it even got published.
Riker
No wonder I get so many sore throats!
Sean
“I’m no doctor, but every place in your body is connected to your immune system.”
Actually, there is a blood-testis barrier that dramatically reduces contact between sperm and the immune system. Even so, there is often a certain level of exposure (if nothing else, the barrier can break due to testicular trauma), and even when an immune response is provoked, it doesn’t cause flu symptoms (instead the sperm just get antibodies attached to them and don’t move as well). More info on immune response to sperm here: http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/urology/male_infertility/Immunology_of_male_infertility.html
Jeffree
@Sean: thanks for the clear information and link. I have no insight into what hypothesis they were testing, but the research design seems muddled, at best. Until the results are replicated with control groups and a larger sample-size, I’ll remain skeptical.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that I don’t have such reactions to autologous semen !
Nick Whipple
@Silver: Silver stated “I’m no doctor, but every place in your body is connected to your immune system.”
That is not true. There are many areas in your body that your immune system does NOT have access to. For instance, your spinal cord and brain.
People with Multiple Sclerosis suffer from the immune system gaining access to the spinal cord and brain, which it is not supposed to, and then attacks the spinal cord and brain as if they were unknown intruders into the body.
A woman’s immune system never has access to a fetus either. Or else the immune system would eat it (which does happen sometimes).
mick
i’m allergic to my semen on my skin around my genital area i get pus blisters
Antonn lynn
@mick thats the same problem i have which is what led me to this question in the first place
Mike UK
@mick: I have a friend with the same problem, even worse if he gets another guys semen on him, literally burns his skin!