Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Malilong: Art of healing is sacred By Frank Malilong The Other Side
WHAT is this world coming to?
What’s happening to us, men?
Last week, a young man in Negros Occidental lost his life to tetanus following a procedure in which pellets were imbedded in his sexual organ. Quite regularly in recent years, men turn up at hospital emergency rooms for removal of diseased tissues in the same part of the male anatomy months after they had jelly (or gel?) implants.
Yesterday, we all read about the male florist who had to be operated on in order to remove a perfume canister from his rectum. I was told that in another hospital long ago, a similar operation was performed but it wasn’t a can but a soft drink bottle that was removed.
Every day I am assaulted by a barrage of unwanted e-mails advertising products or services that promise penile enlargement, riding on the popular belief that sexual gratification is directly proportionate to the size of a man’s apparatus.
Experts, including the popular Dr. Margarita Holmes, have debunked the notion as a myth but not all men are listening. Thus, the market for the products and services advertised in the Internet as well as for the pellet or jelly implants.
For obvious reasons, the implant is performed hush-hush and by an unlicensed practitioner. Because the instruments used in the operation are not sterile, the risk of infection is real. The effect of the infection can be immediate as in the case of the young Negrense or may take time like those of the men who had diseased tissues removed from where they had jelly injected months or even years before.
You cannot outlaw vanity or the sense of machismo, no matter how false.
Women have undergone silicone implants and facelifts even during the time when it was not safe to do so. But men don’t have a Dr. Belo, only quacks.
So unless they heed the advice in the song that says, “it’s not what you’ve got but how you use it,” many more will end up dead or, if they’re lucky, in an operating room.
Which brings us to the case of the male florist whose case is now the talk of the town. Most newspaper accounts describe him as gay, which is quite obvious, since the can surely didn’t land in his anus by accident while he was relieving himself.
But sexual predilection is a minor issue, if at all, in his case. The bigger issue is the distasteful behavior of the people who attended to him in the operating room of a government hospital.
Indeed, the greater perversion was not in the insertion of the perfume container in the patient’s anus but in the unbridled glee and amusement of those who did or were present at the removal of the object.
The art of healing is sacred and the bond of confidentiality between doctor and patient is supposed to be inviolable. If the doctors had recorded the surgery, with the patient’s consent, for scientific purposes, it would have been understandable, considering how unusual the case was. What took place was nothing remotely scientific, however. It was a circus.
The young man who had pellet implants paid for his indiscretion with his life; the florist with his health and reputation. How do you make the doctors pay?
