https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1413-2536
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
James M Jones, Kyle Cedermark, David Barham, Martin S Gross, Response to Letter to the Editor on “Does blue balls exist, and why should we care?”, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2024;, qdae062, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdae062
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
We are pleased to see that our expert opinion piece is generating dialogue regarding blue balls.1 We welcome ongoing discussion of this topic. We clearly agree that blue balls is understudied, and we applaud Levang et al for publishing the lone scientific investigation of blue balls in the literature to date.2 The authors attempted to quantify this phenomenon using survey data. In their letter to the editor, they challenge our postulation that blue balls might be attributed to psychogenic phenomena. The authors also make the erroneous assumption that our conclusion is to dismiss blue balls pain as “not real.” They equate blue balls with dyspareunia (and genitopelvic pain in general) to provide an instance where labeling pain as psychogenic may have hindered patient care.
We would like to remind readers that somatic symptom disorder is characterized by pain symptoms that are very real. We are in no way questioning that a subset of individuals report having painful experiences that they ascribe to blue balls. Understanding blue balls as a possible psychogenic effect that shares characteristics of somatic symptom disorder does not dismiss the reality of people’s pain. It does, however, offer a plausible explanation for this pain in a way that the “epididymal hypertension” hypothesis does not. We feel that the latter explanation is a fallacy, as clearly explained in our expert opinion and inaccurately characterized in the response letter by the authors.
