Vasectomy Risks and Benefits
Vasectomy Risks and Benefits
Once you’ve made up your mind that you never want to have any more children, there’s no more reliable form of contraception than vasectomy. But one precaution: To lower the risk of your vasectomy failing, make sure the surgeon who does yours is qualified and has a lot of experience.
When done correctly by an experienced physician, as few as 1 in 1,000 vasectomies fail to do their job — preventing you from ejaculating sperm when you have an orgasm, thus preventing pregnancy. But when performed by doctors who do vasectomies fewer than 50 times a year, the failure rate is as high as 10% to 17% or more.
Andy Garcia Puts Family First
Listening to Andy Garcia talk about his son's latest hobby, you get thesense that a toy caboose is just as important to the actor, director, andmusician as the release of his latest feature film, Ocean's Thirteen,which opened last month to fanfare, here and abroad."He plays a lot of trains," Garcia says of the 5-year-old aficionado, andthen adds with gravitas: "He's an avid collector."Unlike some of his overtly ambitious, publicity-seeking peers, Garcia, 51,is a private man who treasures...
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To understand how a vasectomy works, you need to understand a bit of your own anatomy. Sperm are made in your testes and stored in an adjacent sac called the epididymis. From there, they travel, whipping their tails, through a 15-inch, shoestring-sized tube called the vas deferens. Inside your abdomen, the vas connects with the semen-producing prostate gland and seminal vesicles adjacent to the bladder.
This is the launching pad for the male contribution to reproduction. If the sperm don’t get to the pad, there’s still blastoff, but it’s the unmanned version — no sperm astronauts to couple with the ova in her space.
To perform a vasectomy, the surgeon first kneads the scrotum until he can feel the vas — a process that looks something like a guy trying to find the tie-string after it has retracted into the waistband of his sweatpants. After finding it, the doctor pokes a hole (the best surgeons use a needle rather than a scalpel) in the scrotum and uses tiny clamps to pull out a short length of vas.
Surgeons have used a variety of techniques to cut, inactivate, and close the two ends of the vas. The best technique, according to recent surveys, is called “intraluminal cauterization with fascial interposition.” With this technique, the surgeon slices the vas in two, scars the inside — or lumina — of one tube with a heated needle. Then the surgeon pulls up the fascia — tissue surrounding the tube — and clamps or sutures it over the tube end.
When done correctly by an experienced physician, as few as 1 in 1,000 vasectomies fail to do their job — preventing you from ejaculating sperm when you have an orgasm, thus preventing pregnancy. But when performed by doctors who do vasectomies fewer than 50 times a year, the failure rate is as high as 10% to 17% or more.
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Andy Garcia Puts Family First
Listening to Andy Garcia talk about his son's latest hobby, you get thesense that a toy caboose is just as important to the actor, director, andmusician as the release of his latest feature film, Ocean's Thirteen,which opened last month to fanfare, here and abroad."He plays a lot of trains," Garcia says of the 5-year-old aficionado, andthen adds with gravitas: "He's an avid collector."Unlike some of his overtly ambitious, publicity-seeking peers, Garcia, 51,is a private man who treasures...
Read the Andy Garcia Puts Family First article > >
How vasectomies are done
To understand how a vasectomy works, you need to understand a bit of your own anatomy. Sperm are made in your testes and stored in an adjacent sac called the epididymis. From there, they travel, whipping their tails, through a 15-inch, shoestring-sized tube called the vas deferens. Inside your abdomen, the vas connects with the semen-producing prostate gland and seminal vesicles adjacent to the bladder.
This is the launching pad for the male contribution to reproduction. If the sperm don’t get to the pad, there’s still blastoff, but it’s the unmanned version — no sperm astronauts to couple with the ova in her space.
To perform a vasectomy, the surgeon first kneads the scrotum until he can feel the vas — a process that looks something like a guy trying to find the tie-string after it has retracted into the waistband of his sweatpants. After finding it, the doctor pokes a hole (the best surgeons use a needle rather than a scalpel) in the scrotum and uses tiny clamps to pull out a short length of vas.
The best vasectomy technique
Surgeons have used a variety of techniques to cut, inactivate, and close the two ends of the vas. The best technique, according to recent surveys, is called “intraluminal cauterization with fascial interposition.” With this technique, the surgeon slices the vas in two, scars the inside — or lumina — of one tube with a heated needle. Then the surgeon pulls up the fascia — tissue surrounding the tube — and clamps or sutures it over the tube end.
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