Lengthen Your Life #2

The second recommendation I give my students often gets me a roll of the eyes and a few nervous laughs.  Be monogamous, but only with someone else who is monogamous with you.  I know in today's new age, take care of yourself first, enjoy life to its fullest, friends with benefits mentality that may seem prudish, but the reality is that multiple sex partners decrease your life expectancy. Whether you are a Darwin quoting natural selection theorist or a Bible carrying creationist, both worlds have their own reasons for recommending monogamy.  Unfortunately, what's being taught in the high school health classes only tell a fraction of truth.

From the Biblical perspective, monogamy is a basic tenet.  Maybe He put the nasty critters that like to live in those intimate places down here to remind us that He said find one and stick with them.  I know my chaplain friends would have hours they could spend on that subject.

Natural selection would look at monogamy and say that within one generation of a monogamous planet, we could eradicate a whole host of diseases.  In Pathology, we talk about a wide variety of conditions that Modern Medicine is trying to either find vaccines to prevent or treatments to cure.  The conditions I'm talking about have two modes of transmission.  One is skin to skin contact and the other is body fluid transmission.  Skin to skin transmission includes conditions like pubic lice, genital warts, herpes simplex, HPV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, trichomoniasis, and mulloscum contagiosum.  Body fluid transmitted conditions include hepatitis B and C and HIV/AIDS.

Most have heard of some of these conditions, but they aren't always aware of the consequences of them.  We've learned that HPV causes cervical cancer in some women.  What we're learning is that it may also be the cause of other cancers in areas like the mouth and throat (no offense to our former president, but that means oral sex is still sex).  Gonorrhea and chlamydia are often asymptomatic in women, but can cause infertility if left untreated.  Hepatitis B and C can end up killing your liver, which in turn makes your body unable to control blood sugar or detoxify the blood.  In the end, many of these conditions have a significant chance of shortening your life, but all are preventable with proper protection - right?  WRONG

Those conditions that are transmitted by skin to skin contact will NOT be deterred by using any type of barrier protection.  Sex is a contact sport.  It doesn't work well without skin to skin contact.  As to the body fluid transmission, let's look at the critter size.

Condom manufacturers and the CDC show failure rates utilizing these products at anywhere from 1-30%.  They understand that if 100 heterosexual couples used condoms, where one of the couple is a fertile ovulating woman and the other is a virile man, somewhere between 1 and 30 of those women will become pregnant from that encounter.  Some of this is due to misuse of the product, but the rest is due to either product failure during the act or poor product quality and excessively large pores in the product.  Here it really does come down to size matters.  If we consider the hepatitis and HIV viruses, and compare them with a sperm cell, what's the difference in size?  If the viruses were about the size of a baseball or softball, then a sperm would be 50 yards long.  Yes, that's half a football field compared to a few inches.  You could only fit 15 sperm cells in the period at the end of this sentence.  Yet, in the same space you could fit over 6,000 AIDS viruses, over 14,000 hepatitis B viruses, and over 16,000 hepatitis C viruses.  We are expecting a product that fails to keep something as large as a sperm from being transmitted, yet we tell everyone that it will protect them from getting the diseases that are miniscule in comparison.  Either the "experts" don't know their stuff, or they don't care, and are telling blatant lies.  Either way, there is no such thing as "safe sex".

Everything from gonorrhea to syphilis to hepatitis to AIDS could literally be wiped off the face of the planet if only we could learn to control ourselves, but the "experts" have led us to believe that we are safe with "protection".  It seems they are more concerned with finding vaccines to inject us with or treatments to sell us than empowering us with the information that would make us healthier.  It's time to stop lying to the public and let them make decisions based on correct information.  Monogamy will statistically increase your life expectancy.  Find one partner who will commit to only you, and you'll both live longer.
  
Look for future blogs that will expose more lies with the truth the "experts" are ignoring or hiding.  You can also visit my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.