Are You Thinking With Your Brain or Your Bulge?

The age-old cliche that claims we can only operate using with one "head" at any given time is nothing more than a silly old wives' tale, right? Actually, it's one that proves true a lot more often than we'd like to admit. Let's examine the evidence.

How many times have we shoved our safer judgement to the back of our carnally-motivated minds at the opportunity of an eyes-rolled-to-the-back-of-our-head orgasm regardless of the outcome? When has a mutually rewarding shag taken a metaphorical back seat to an innocently chaste chat? Why is it that when we see a pristinely angelic face across the bar, the whispers of our shouldertop pitchfork devils convince us it's a good idea to bareback with a stranger?

Don't get me wrong. The ongoing struggle between dealing with and giving in to our inherent "sin" is part of what makes us, well... us. But it is important to recognize that both our brains and our bulges have valid voices. And, believe it or not, both regions of the human body may hold key scientific breakthroughs on the path toward an HIV-free existence.

For years, many scientists have maintained that HIV transmission rates are lower in circumcised men than in their uncut counterparts. And, for years, the jaded skeptic in me has rolled his eyes and dismissed it as another inane technique for society to impose its tradition of genital mutilation onto each oncoming generation.

A few weeks ago, however, time.com released an article describing how those claims might actually be true. It even admitted that, "until now, researchers didn't fully understand why." According to the piece, "in a study published in the online medical journal mBio, scientists say that changes in the population of bacteria living on and around the penis may be partly responsible."

Apparently, a group of needle-stickers have been observing the growth of penile microbial inhabitants among Ugandan men for a year. And I thought my jobs were odd. Anyway, at the end of the study, the circumcised men were brewing a dramatically lower amount of low-oxygen cooties on their unsheathed jungle vines. This lack of elephant-trunk-funk evidently boosts men's ability to fight off infections like HIV.

Or, for those of us whose brains turn off when euphemisms are used to describe the penis and its propensity to act as a pungently aromatic petri dish, "A high burden of bacteria could disrupt the ability of specialized immune cells known as Langerhans to activate immune defenses."

The piece goes on to explain how Langerhans grab invading microbes like bacteria or viruses and expose them to our immune system so it can recognize and react to other copies of them. But in steamier environments which are enclosed by a flap of skin, inflammatory reactions increase and the Langerhans agents actually start to infect healthy cells with the microbes instead.

Of course, this microorganism overload can be lessened, or even prevented entirely, by adopting a simple cleaning routine. Then again, on how many dates have we been assured of the cleanliness of a guy's packed meat... only to be smacked by the surprise whiff of a fisherman's dock instead? Come on, boys. Drag a bar of soap across the manscape once in a while, will ya?

Moving upward from the darker crevices of manhood and into the cranial realm responsible for most other messes, another possible ray of hope emerges. The Times of India published an article about a new "nanotechnique" that can deliver and release AZTTP into the brain. Developed by Madhavan Nair and Sakhrat Khizroev of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine department of immunology, this method uses magneto-electric nanoparticles (abbreviated as MENs, heheh) to cross the notoriously near-impenetrable blood-brain barrier and deliver a healthy dose of AZTTP. Leave it to MEN to find a way to penetrate something.

Another thing I never thought would exist: "a healthy dose of AZT" - a drug that killed thousands of people in the '80s. But hey, they tacked on TP at the end this time, which stands for triphosphate, so it must be safe. Anyway, the procedure promises to transmit up to 97 percent more of the stuff than without the MENs. At least it may take some of the strain off the liver, which is where most antiretroviral therapies are deposited before they reach the brain.

You see? There are potential answers in even the most unexpected of places. To find them, all you have to do is use your head... but as a man, you get to decide which one.