A sneeze isn’t always what it seems!


I’m not sure what to make of this report.

Sure, you sneeze when you’ve got a cold. But some sneezes may happen just by thinking about sex or having an orgasm, British doctors report.

Mahmood Bhutta, a specialist in ear-nose-and-throat surgery at England’s Wexham Park Hospital, writes of a colleague who once had a patient who “described uncontrollable fits of sneezing” immediately after having any sexual thought.

That patient, who was a middle-aged man, had no other symptoms. He said he’d had those sneezing fits immediately after thinking sexual thoughts throughout his adult life.

Bhutta and his colleague decided to do a little research, and they figured that since the condition might be embarrassing, it might not get reported — except in Internet chat rooms.

So the researchers googled “sex, sneeze, OR sneezing” twice in 2007, and came up with reports by 17 people — men and women — who reported sneezing right after thinking sexual thoughts, and reports by three people of sneezing after orgasm.

Long before the Internet — back in the 19th century — there were reports of rare people who sneezed when sexually excited, but “there was no credible reason given for the phenomenon,” Bhutta’s team writes.

Bhutta’s paper doesn’t settle why some people sneeze when they think sexual thoughts or when they have an orgasm. But the researchers suggest that sexual thoughts or orgasm might trigger the body’s subconscious nervous system, which could lead to sneezing in some people.

The report appears in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Er . . . um . . . yes, well, quite!

What happens if you get a seasonal attack of hay fever? Is this a sign of a rampant libido, or an allergy? Should you treat it with antihistamines like Benadryl, decongestants like Sudafed, or sexual dysfunction medication like Viagra? What happens if you take all three in combination? Do you get a rampant case of . . . oh, never mind!

Peter

7 comments

  1. Uh-oh…!

    Just today I had a sneezing fit in the middle of performing a massage! I sure hope my client hadn’t read about this study…;)

  2. Hah! I hadn’t heard about this, but I HAD heard about a rare disorder in which sneezing CAUSED orgasm.

    What does it mean? The systems in a human are kinda jury-rigged, especially around the sympathetic nervous system…

  3. I’m not alone! Past girlfriends have chuckled about my condition, (and used it to their advantage in several situations where I was trying to remain serious), but I never thought that otherpeople did the same thing. Amazing.

    Matt
    St Paul

  4. Hey….this is nothing to sneeze about…or at…

    *snicker*

    It is interesting though to me. A few years ago now, I read a study that said men’s beards grew heavier if they were expected sexual relations then not.

    They way they tested it was simply….

    Over the course of a year (12 months) men kept thier shavings each time they shaved and recorded their activities in a journal daily.

    While they didn’t write of thier adventures for the most part, they would put down things like “going to a club” or “going on a date”.

    The actuality of obtaining the goal didn’t seem to change the wieght of thier beards…just the expectation thereof.

    It makes sense to me that this is true after all. Procreation is the second most basic drive in humans I think after self preservation (and sometimes even that gets pushed back a notch)…lol

    And the code word I need to type in is funny….

    excitly….lol..mispelt a bit but..hehehe

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