Another Pause to Reflect

November 30th, 2023 § Comments Off on Another Pause to Reflect § permalink

It’s hard to believe that my last post was in 2015, almost 5 years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in force. I started this blog to answer questions that my patients were asking me, and I answered quite a lot here. When it began, it was 2010, a scant 6 years after the debut of Facebook, 4 years after Twitter, and only 3 years after the first iPhone. Much has happened since then.

In my last post, I wrote that you could follow me on Twitter. That was before Twitter sold itself, renamed itself X, and removed nearly all content moderation. I no longer go there.

I’ve kept the engine in this blog running smoothly so that you can search for topics, explore the archives, and use the word cloud. The information is still good and timely.

We’re entering a golden age of male reproductive medicine with new diagnostic tools and the promise of medicines specifically designed to treat male infertility. From time to time I’ll post the big advances here. But for now, enjoy and explore the site.

A Pause to Reflect

June 4th, 2015 § 2 comments § permalink

Follow me on Twitter. Seriously.

It’s been a little over five years. I wrote my first post on this blog, The Mysteries of Funny Looking Sperm, April 18, 2010. At the time, this blog was very much an experiment, and I had no idea how it would work. In my daily life, I see a lot of men with difficulties having children or other male health problems, and they don’t tell you anything about that when you take “sex ed” in high school. Lots of men share the same problems, and I would say the same things to different men throughout the day. So I thought that I would put my end of those conversations in a general way on a blog, so that men around the world with questions about male reproductive health might find some answers.

My first few blog posts came from those common conversations. I see a lot of men with male endocrine problems, so I wrote a few posts on how the endocrine system works in a man and how it can be fixed if needed. I wrote about concerns like, can a man’s underwear cause problems with his sperm? At first, I shut off comments after two weeks, but I quickly realized that many people found my posts not by reading the blog start to finish, but through a search for a specific concern. That makes a lot of sense: I do that, too. People would be coming at a post weeks, months, or even years after I wrote it. My third post on April 28th, 2010, How Clomid Works in Men, is still my most visited one with 874 comments as of today.

After a while, people started asking great questions in the comments. Sometimes I could answer them in a couple of lines in the comments section, but some required longer answers. I added posts for a few of these great questions. Understandably, although I tried to make it very prominent in the FAQ, people would still ask me medical questions about themselves and their loved ones. It’s really frustrating, but I can’t answer them. I don’t have the basic information through the web that all doctors need to make a diagnosis and treat a patient, which includes a physical examination. I need to see people in person to be their doctor.

As the blog evolved, I began posting about news events, important scientific studies, and general items of interest in male health. But most people still come across the blog by searching for a specific problem or question, and that’s the way it mainly seems to work. So for those who read a post from years past and have a question, I’ll often recommend reading the comments and other posts on the blog, as the answers are usually there.

But if you’re interested in male health, and you want a more up-to-date stream of information, then follow me on Twitter. I post pretty frequently there, often with links to important news articles about male health and the other parts of my job in science, engineering, and education. You’ll even see my human side from time to time. I’ll of course still write here on this blog when the need for more words arises.

See you in the Twitterverse!

Welcome, Dr. Kathrins!

December 23rd, 2014 § Comments Off on Welcome, Dr. Kathrins! § permalink

Marty
We welcome Doctor Martin Kathrins as a contributor to Maledoc. Doctor Kathrins is a male infertility specialist with interests in the treatment of men with azoospermia, advances in hormone replacement therapy, and surgical innovation. He completed undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Pennsylvania and medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He finished his urology residency at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. He hopes to advance medical and surgical treatments for men with infertility. He also has an interest in medical device innovation for a variety of urologic conditions. Welcome, Doctor Kathrins!

More New Nuts and Bolts

June 28th, 2014 § 2 comments § permalink

Back in June, 2010, I installed software that made reading this blog easier on handheld devices like iPhones and Android phones. I’ve been doing some upgrading of the guts that make this blog work, and added improvements in how this blog appears on handheld devices. I’ve tested it on an iPhone, but I don’t have an Android phone handy. Let me know how it looks!

Photo

Uterus Transplants Are Here

May 17th, 2014 § Comments Off on Uterus Transplants Are Here § permalink

About one in 500 women either have no uterus or problems so severe with it that it can’t carry a child. Until recently, these conditions had no medical treatment.

In Fertility and SterilityMats Brännström and a team of surgeons at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden report uterus transplantation in nine women, eight of whom who were born without a uterus, and one who had it removed for cancer. Two of the women had complications that required surgical removal of the transplanted organs, but seven women made it to six months with their transplants.

The ultimate test of these transplanted uteri remains: whether they can carry babies. If they can, this would be a great advance for the millions of women afflicted worldwide by problems with their uteri so severe that pregnancy is impossible.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Brännström last month at a conference in Brisbane, Australia. These surgeries are not easy, requiring up to six hours to remove the uterus from the donor and up to 13 hours to transplant it into the recipient. It’s a rare kind of surgeon that puts such great effort into coordinating complex care and developing new techniques in a careful and methodical way. Thanks to his efforts, we may be closer to a time when a woman without a womb isn’t hopeless if she wants to carry her child.