An academic's perspective

Hi TP,

I’m a new member and I just learned about PE a few months ago. I’ve been reading up about it here and at the pegym forums ever since. From the perspective of as an academic who has conducted several studies and published several papers in scientific journals (I am a Ph. D student in theoretical physics), I can’t understand why the scientific literature on PE is so sparse!

From my experience in the academic community, we are always jumping at the first opportunity to study something new. To an academic, the number of studies published/citations generated is a metaphorical penis and publishing more is adding inches to it! There is a pressure to publish, and we are always desperate to find new uncharted territories to work on even if it is a rumor or something uninteresting or unimportant and not widely applicable. No matter what it is, scientific groups will race to study it.

Yet, here the research topic is probably the biggest fascination of man since ancient times (the stars are the seconds biggest fascination :P) and is highly applicable with the potential of improving the lives of half of the world’s male population who are below the median size. We have a whole community with a plethora of anecdotal and pictorial evidence, thousands of members, and probably hundreds of people being willing participants in in a relatively simple to conduct study. Despite all this, no medical researcher is exactly kicking down any doors to study PE.

I’d say it’s time we raise some awareness for this and try to find ways reconcile the differences between the thousands of people PE has worked for one end of the table and the denying and scaring doctors on the other. I’d love to hear some suggestions on how to do this.

I think it would be nice if we invited a few medical researchers to take a look and browse the forum and see the sheer amount of impossible to fabricate anecdotal evidence here. This would perhaps motivate a few more of them to conduct some real research on the topic. Who knows, the results might even help us improve our technique, come up with better routines, improve gains, have better safety etc.

Here, I emphasize ‘researchers’ not just regular ‘doctors’. A doctor will just repeat the same thing he learned in medical school ten years ago and might not have sufficient experience in the scientific method. A researcher has an open mind and would jump at the opportunity to study anything new.

Good thoughts, but honestly, I think it’s pretty nice when most people don’t know about PE or just reject it as total bullshit.

Perhaps theoretical physicists will race to study anything relevant to their field of study, but you’ll find few people in the medical field willing to undertake an extensive analysis of something as mundane (from a scientific perspective) as penis enlargement. Furthermore, attempting to get the resulting work from such an extensive analysis on such a mundane topic published would be futile because it’s such a prosaic and scientifically unrewarding topic.

Academia is also highly parochial and discriminative of some scientists’ work so much so that a scientist (such as Alexander Shulgin, for example) can become entirely ostracized from academia for conducting controversial research and attempting to get it published. In the case of the highly talented biochemist Dr. Alexander Shulgin, his work on psychotropic compounds and their psychopharmacological effects was and still is far more pertinent to science than increasing the size of one’s pudendum. yet it evoked censure snd thence excommunication among the all-too-prevalent and influential dogmatic academics . As an aspiring pharmacologist myself, I concede that psychotropics (namely entactogens such as the infamous MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) and myriad of hallucinogens such as Dr. Shulgin’s ingenious 2c-xx series of compounds) are invaluable tools to psychology and psychonautics and profoundly interesting substances from both the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic perspective, as well as the molecular physical perspective.

Yet such work with unbounded potential can be patently rejected by academia, but you wonder why something as insignificant as PE isn’t to be found in the scientific literature?

What fallacious thinking. I thought physicists were intelligent enough to recognize a cogent argument from drivel. How exactly does having the potential to augment one’s penile dimensions improve the lives of men [presumably with low self-esteem and BDD] substantially enough to warrant academia paying it any attention? For over half the people here there’s already something scientific that can improve their lives more than a bigger wang: psychotherapy.

Again, this implies that it’s scientifically beneficial to conduct a study on PE and that anecdotal evidence and dubious photographs should have all scientists from around the globe hankering to winnow through every picture on this site to conduct some study. What study, precisely? You’re the putative Ph.D, not me. You’ve gone through the rigors of academia more than I and that should have inculcated some sense of how to conduct a scientifically acceptable study on your own. You should have the expertise and you obviously have the interest. So you should be set. Just try to get it published and let me know how it pans out for you and if you’re still relevant in physics afterward.

How indubitable the evidence may be doesn’t detract from how trivial such research would be. Besides, how does a free of charge technique that anyone can learn autodidactically and do at home benefit a doctor or medical professional? The development of some pharmaceutical that enhances penis size would be a much more consequential and expedient endeavor for anyone like a medical doctor trying to garner enough money and eminence to justify his career choice.

I have to agree with Praseo.

I think this fascination with penis size is a modern day, media induced “problem”.

I seem to remember reading/hearing somewhere that in the past (roman times/culture maybe?) a large penis was considered grotesque, and undesirable in general society.

And I have to agree with john_j

So we should close the forum?

On the basis of most real scientists being too busy tackling more exigent issues than men’s bathetic and insubstantial feelings of inadequacy? No.

I don’t think you can honestly call PE mundane. Lots improve their function and EQ without drugs and or surgery. And it has the potential to replace penis enlargement surgery (that tens of thousands of men undergo) which is risky and has a low satisfaction rate. PE investigated as a surgical alternative would make a great scientific paper.

I completely agree that huge problem in the academic community. They are very skeptical to believe anything unless it is the result of another academic’s work and take a very negative and safe stance on all speculative issues. But PE is slowly getting their attention. You now see articles like ‘Penis Extenders may actually work’ and ‘Patients considering penis enlargement surgery are counseled to try other methods first’. It’s just that lots of researchers have just never even heard of PE or know that this many people practice it.

For patients who are considering penis enlargement surgery, a cheaper, safer alternative like PE (or as you mentioned psychotherapy) could improve their lives. Personally, I was projecting a bit here because I am way below average and I know from experience that a bigger penis would definitely improve my life, which is why I found this forum and got into PE in the first place!

All I am saying here, is that I would personally love to see more papers on PE as a surgical alternative or replacement and that if I was a urological researcher rather than a physical researcher, I would most definitely be working on this.

On the basis that less people knows about PE, the better. That was what I was commenting.

John_J - An academic’s perspective

Really feeling let down because I was looking forward to a lecture on sparce matracies ;)

But seriously -

I mentioned I did PE on another forum and they all kicked my butt. The owner of the forum even posted a picture of African women stretching their necks with metal bands. Their final pronouncement on the subject was that if it were possible, doctors would tell us.

Any attempt I made to explain it scientifically was rebutted. My offer to post before and after pics brought disgust!

Incidentally, as you probably know there have been many instances in physics where new ideas were completely taboo at first. Einstein was very lucky to meet almost no resistance.

PE is as mundane as a breast augmentation. But with you being a theoretical physicist, I’d imagine you’d find PE mundane comparable to, say, using your assumed education to participate in solving some of the most profound questions man has confronted? Which leads me to broach another issue: why not expend your time utilizing your Ph.D in physics instead of asking why scientists ignore penis enlargement?

There is not exactly a paucity of pharmaceuticals used in the treatment of erectile dysfunction. PE, in this regard, is extraneous to everyone but those who ardently believe all medications or exogenous substances altogether or pernicious and should be avoided.

What does this do for you exactly? Do you require academia’s admission to do PE? If something works for you that’s all that should matter, even if we were discussing the placebo effect. But personally, when and if I attain my Ph.D in pharmacology, PE will no longer be a concern of mine and I will, in lieu of finding alternatives to psychotherapy to assuage many men’s BDD, expend my time in researching more pertinent and exigent issues. Engineering pharmaceuticals with the subsidiary work of organic chemists and biochemists to ameliorate the affects of deleterious but hitherto untreatable conditions, syndromes, and diseases is more important than better enabling some guy’s penis to grow an inch or two. Or to establishing an acceptance of psychoactive compounds to be utilized in psychological and psychiatric milieus so as to remedy the cause of BDD itself (therefore one of the main sources of feelings of inadequacy relating to the body and its parts and thus render PE something less than a incurable monomania) by way of ego dissolution as a sequela of psilocybin (O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) administration. Don’t you agree?

So the Ph.D did nothing for you in terms of improving your life? If I had a Ph.D, I honesty would care not about my penis size; the academic credentials alone would ease the low self-esteem that is the main reason I even have a profile here. If academic success and doing something you (presumably) love -theoretical physics- as a career doesn’t make you happy, nor will any size penis.

You can learn Urology by yourself or you can go to Med. School. Urology isn’t a complex subject and I’d figure you could learn the basics of it in a few weeks; the basics being enough to conduct your own research.

By the way, what type of physical research do you do?

There are a number of people who are physicians, engineers, researchers and have any kind of ‘credentials’ you can think of, on this forum. One can have the desire of both a Ph.D. and a bigger penis, I tend to believe.

Being something ‘mundane’ or not is basically a subjective judgement. After all, the whole human genre is nothing when compared to the whole universe, I’ve heard.

Medical research is motivated by profit and not solutions. Now, if there was promise of a pharmaceutical solution for PE the research efforts would be enormous. Just look at the ED market now.

But to be a productive scientist, one must dedicate their lives to science; not the fatuous and incessant improvement of things that don’t need to be improved.

Those Ph.Ds here on this site - what have they contributed to their field of expertise? I think I know the answer. You wouldn’t find an Ed Witten, for example, on a site like this or any forum, actually. A man of his intellectual stature is consumed by his work - incessantly thinking of physics, mathematics, etc.; not partaking in dilatory actions like posting on forums.

The bare fact though, is that you don’t know. It is just your speculation. Maybe there are some Nobel prizes that are members of this site, who knows?