Blogs - you've gotta love 'em. :)

Here's some 'research' which suggests that male circumcision causes
permanent brain damage.

I guess that explains a few things.

<http://drmomma.blogspot.com/2009/10/mri-studies-brain-permanently-altered.html>:

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MRI Studies: The Brain Permanently Altered From Infant Circumcision

by Dr. Paul D. Tinari Ph.D.

Two of my physics professors at Queen's University (Dr. Stewart & Dr.
McKee) were the original developers of Positron Emission Tomography
(PET) for medical applications. They and a number of other Queen's
physicists also worked on improving the accuracy of fMRI for observing
metabolic activity within the human body.

As a graduate student working in the Dept. of Epidemiology, I was
approached by a group of nurses who were attempting to organize a
protest against male infant circumcision in Kinston General Hospital.
They said that their observations indicated that babies undergoing the
procedure were subjected to significant and inhumane levels of pain
that subsequently adversely affected their behaviours. They said that
they needed some scientific support for their position. It was my idea
to use fMRI and/or PET scanning to directly observe the effects of
circumcision on the infant brain.

The operator of the MRI machine in the hospital was a friend of mine
and he agreed to allow us to use the machine for research after normal
operational hours. We also found a nurse who was under intense
pressure by her husband to have her newborn son circumcised and she
was willing to have her son to be the subject of the study. Her goal
was to provide scientific information that would eventually be used to
ban male infant circumcision. Since no permission of the ethics
committee was required to perform any routine male infant
circumcision, we did not feel it was necessary to seek any permission
to carry out this study.

We tightly strapped an infant to a traditional plastic
"circumrestraint" using Velcro restraints. We also completely
immobilized the infant's head using standard surgical tape. The entire
apparatus was then introduced into the MRI chamber. Since no metal
objects could be used because of the high magnetic fields, the doctor
who performed the surgery used a plastic bell ("Plastibell") with a
sterilized obsidian bade to cut the foreskin. No anaesthetic was used.

The baby was kept in the machine for several minutes to generate
baseline data of the normal metabolic activity in the brain. This was
used to compare to the data gathered during and after the surgery.
Analysis of the MRI data indicated that the surgery subjected the
infant to significant trauma. The greatest changes occurred in the
limbic system concentrating in the amygdala and in the frontal and
temporal lobes.

A neurologist who saw the results to postulated that the data
indicated that circumcision affected most intensely the portions of
the victim's brain associated with reasoning, perception and emotions.
Follow up tests on the infant one day, one week and one month after
the surgery indicated that the child's brain never returned to its
baseline configuration. In other words, the evidence generated by this
research indicated that the brain of the circumcised infant was
permanently changed by the surgery.

Our problems began when we attempted to publish our findings in the
open medical literature. All of the participants in the research
including myself were called before the hospital discipline committee
and were severely reprimanded. We were told that while male
circumcision was legal under all circumstances in Canada, any attempt
to study the adverse effects of circumcision was strictly prohibited
by the ethical regulations. Not only could we not publish the results
of our research, but we also had to destroy all of our results. If we
refused to comply, we were all threatened with immediate dismissal and
legal action.

I would encourage anyone with access to fMRI and /or PET scanning
machines to repeat our research as described above, confirm our
results, and then publish the results in the open literature.

Dr. Paul D. Tinari, Ph.D.
Director,
Pacific Institute for Advanced Study

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