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At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch. Yang, Felsen, and Poppas also report a “capillary perfusion testing,” which means a physician or nurse pushes a finger nail on the girl’s clitoris to see if the blood goes away and comes back, a sign of healthy tissue. Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls. He intends to chart the development of their sexual sensation over time.
I guess that’s one way to explain why you have a lifetime supply of Trojan Vibrating Touch personal massagers stashed in your closet: “But officer, they’re for the children!”
Unsurprisingly, Dreger and Feder were unable to find another pediatric urologist who uses this “ground breaking” post-surgical kiddie diddling technique. What’s more, Poppas knows that inflicting this sort of trauma on children is far beyond the bounds of acceptable scientific practice. That’s why he didn’t bother to obtain IRB approval for his unorthodox use of “vibratory devices.” Dreger explains:
If he had sought IRB approval for the “sensory testing,” the ethics staff might have sat up and asked him what the heck he thought he was doing to these girls, and they would have tried to make sure the parents were informed about the unknowns and risks, and the girls could have refused to participate.
Perhaps Dix Poppas (whose name could inspire an entire Freudian treatise) thinks his work is so important that ethical boundaries don’t apply. Maybe he’s simply a child molester who takes sadistic pleasure in mutilating and traumatizing the most vulnerable among us. Either way, we can’t allow his battery of little girls to go on, not for one more day.
Contact:
Rosemary Kraemer, PhD
Director, Human Subjects Protections
Weill Cornell Medical College Institutional Review Board
E-mail: rtkraeme@med.cornell.edu
Telephone: (646) 962-8200
And please call on the American Board of Urology and the American Academy of Pediatrics to condemn Dix Poppas’ unethical research and clinical practices.
Thanks to Rachael Larimore and @sarahbellumd for alerting me to this story on Twitter.
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Follow Jenn Q. Public on Twitter and read more of her work at JennQPublic.com.
