Across the pond

So after Deep Throat and the Iraq war now for a blog on something really serious. The article by two scientists, Harold Maxwell and Mahmood Bhutta, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Brought to my attention at this hour of the night, because both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph has chosen to report on it.

With all the rigour of their discipline the scientists have discovered that for some people sex and sneezing go together, well, like love and marriage. This is because, the scientists assert, of a fault in their autonomic nervous system. Their research was based by interviews with people in internet chat rooms. They found that 17 men and women sneezed after thoughts about sex and that three people sneezed uncontrollably after actually engaging in sexual congress.

That’s science, folks. But first I looked at this mementous story from a journalistic viewpoint.

The Guardian headlined their story:

Sneezing uncontrollably after sex may be more common than realised

The Telegraph went for:

Thoughts of sex ‘can cause some people to sneeze’

Does this mean that Guardian readers do it, while Telegraph readers mostly just think about it? Or is it merely that the sub-editors of The Guardian have a bias towards minorities, whereas those on the Telegraph are conscious of its history and present as the largest circulation serious daily newspaper?

You decide. I certainly can’t.

But both papers report that the scientists think that no-one has discovered this before because people are too embarrassed to talk about it with their doctors. This strikes me as highly questionable.

From my journalistic discipline, where you learn to by your own experience, which you report, and are not concerned to ‘prove’ that your experience means that all people in all societies are governed by what governs you.

As it happens I sneeze hugely quite often after intercourse, but never when I am just thinking about sex. I have never mentioned it to doctors, not because I am embarrassed by it, but because it is too trivial to mention. And it does not in any way interfere with my life, in the way that my recently discovered Viking finger does, not to mention my lifelong depression and the severe headaches, which were the symptom of the tubercular meningitis I suffered when a young man.

This line of thinking led me to realise that I have been much too ready to accept the doctor’s view, that my Viking finger is a genetic condition. The fashion in doctoring has moved in favour of those who look for causes in genes, rather than in the influencing from parenting and from the socio-economic environment. The favoured research is by quantitive studies, which are ‘objective’, rather than depth interviews with patients. The favoured treatments are pills rather than the talking therapies.

But maybe the current medical fashion is just plain wrong. After all, the doctors do not claim to know what causes either Viking finger or sneezing after sex.

I would like to write much more about this. But my own logic is sending me to bed. If my Viking finger is just a result of my genes it does not matter what I do. But if it has been partly caused by my hammering at the keyboard then I need to be careful.

So my New Year’s resolution is to spend more of my time in 2009 having sex and a good sneeze after it.