Not sure about you, but I like to see the good in the bad. By focusing on the flipside of adversity, I get stronger instead of weaker. Hey, I’m the first one to fess up to the unpleasant, abominable and awful, but there’s gotta be a way to make silk…or something…out of a sow’s ear....Continue reading
Tag: sperm production
Take a Moment and Picture Your Fertility
How do you solve tough problems? Maybe you pick at them until they’re gone. Maybe you dance around them until they’re contained. One thing I like to do is to step away and examine them as an outsider, from a completely different perspective. In other words, get out of the trees and look at the whole...Continue reading
FNA Mapping: A Tool for the Trade
Do you have a favorite tool? Maybe a great cooking pot or utensil that really works for you. Possibly a shiny, worn and weathered but perfectly performing baseball glove, or a dinged and pockmarked surfboard that handles virtually every swell. Whether you’re a carpenter and fan of curly maple, or a car hobbyist who likes...Continue reading
Behind Every Egg is A Sperm
It’s a tenet of American culture that if you try hard, you’ll succeed. Hard work pays off. The early bird gets the worm. No goal met without sweat. But, try telling this to sperm. It’s always been thought that the best looking, fastest moving sperm wins the egg. It’s why Woody Allen in Hannah and...Continue reading
A Special March Madness Bro Weekend
Here’s a notion from the natural world: there’s safety in numbers. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. But why is mass behavior safer? Apparently because having many eyes allows for earlier threat recognition and herds offer dilution of danger to individuals within it. Even in humans, research has shown that...Continue reading
Artificial Sperm Reinvented
Do you really know that the world isn’t flat? C’mon, tell the truth. In fact, debate raged on whether the earth is flat or spherical from the 8th century BC well into the second millennium (1520) AD, well over 2000 years! Magellan and scientific proof ended up nailing the truth. In the mystical words of...Continue reading
Can you be allergic to your sperm?
They sat in front of me, notes in hand, having read all they could, and looking somewhat concerned. “We read that vasectomy reversals don’t work because of antibodies that men make to their sperm. Is this true?” Don the Immunology Hat Practically speaking, the world’s first immunologist was the formidable warlord King Mithridates VI of...Continue reading
Helping Wounded Veterans Live and Love
His kidney harbored a cancer and it needed to be removed. As a first year surgeon-in-training, I was consenting him for surgery at the Veterans Hospital in Philadelphia. Unlike most patients, he was unusually calm as I talked him through the procedure and its potentially life threatening complications. At one point, he gently put his...Continue reading
The Boy with the Varicocele
The case of the month is an actual patient of The Turek Clinic His head was topped with bobbing red hair and his face full of freckles. Thin as a beanpole, he spoke softly as if trying to control his cracking pubertal voice. All in, he appeared to be the stuff that teenage boys are...Continue reading
Making Mapping Matter
She approached the microphone slowly from the back of the room, appearing to float, wrapped in her colorful hijab. A doctor from Pakistan, she had some questions and a comment after hearing my talk. A Kind Interrogation “Your Sperm Mapping technique for azoospermic men” she stated softly, “is it done under just local anesthesia?” “Yes,” I responded....Continue reading