Australian readers: Now is the time to tell your GP that you resent having been circumcised

In September 2010, the 'Medical Journal of Australia' (MJA) published an editorial entitled "The case for boosting infant male circumcision in the face of rising heterosexual transmission of HIV" (here).

The e-version of this editorial is behind a paywall on the MJA site, but you can get the jist of the editorial - and how it was used in the mainstream media - from this ABC article: here (the smirking female journalist adds a particularly sick resonance to the story).

According to a recent article in the professional publication 'Australian Doctor' (homepage), "Circumcision row erupts" - also behind a paywall but reproduced in full on The Intactivism Pages website: here - the MJA editorial resulted in a 'barrage of angry letters' from doctors (eight letters were actually published).

The 'Australian Doctor' article (also by a female journalist) only directly quotes the circumcision advocates from the original MJA editorial, and lets the advocates have the last word:

"Parents have a duty to help prevent renal damage, physical, inflammatory and hygiene problems, STIs and cancers in their sons and their sons' future sexual partners. They can do this by arranging for their sons to be circumcised,"

An alarmist editorial, which likely would never have passed the peer-review process to which research articles are subjected, was converted into an easily digestible press-release and picked up by mainstream media outlets to be fed directly to parents, by-passing the mainstray of Australian medical opinion.

Now is the time to talk to your GP about your resentment at having being circumcised. Doctors need to understand the damage of circumcision to give them the resolve to resist demands from parents, hold the editors of medical publications accountable to the high standards expected of practitioners in the medical profession, and to induce them to write letters and articles rejecting the practice of circumcision.

If enough men speak up to their doctors, the attention focused on this issue in Australia could finally induce researchers to conduct quality research into the long-term physical and psychological harm of circumcision and publish in the peer-reviewed literature which forms the basis of medical decision-making.