Headache, pleasure and omen revisited

I want to know if there is a Philippine Headache Society. I have a suspicion that there are headaches that are country-specific and maybe they could help me determine if our headaches are qualitatively different from other kinds of headaches like maybe British, Ethiopian, or Japanese headaches. Maybe we can just overhaul the way government sets its agenda and just classify our priorities according to the most headaches that each national issue gives us. Maybe we can have a NAMFREL of sorts just to tally native headaches. If you think I am being sarcastically crazy (again), ask yourself if our current system is working. I got to thinking of this because there is such a thing as the American Headache Society (really) or AHS and they recently published in their peer-reviewed journal called what else but "Headache," a study by Tim Houle of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine on migraines and sexual desire. I wonder why there are no other journals aptly named according to the general body part in pain like "Toothache," "Stomach Ache" or "Heartache" (which I think medical science usually classifies under "Psychiatry").

Anyway, AHS scientists wanted to zero in on "bedroom headache." They apparently wanted to get to the truth behind the "Not tonight honey, I’ve got a headache" syndrome and see if there is really a link between migraines and sexual desire. And they found out that (and to those who routinely use the headache line as an excuse, please pay closer attention) the opposite is true. Migraine sufferers reported having a significantly higher level of sexual desire than those their age and gender who do not have migraine. Again readers, just so you know the full implications of this breakthrough in your relationships, this means when you say you have a headache, it may mean that chances are, you are experiencing heightened levels of desire, quite the opposite of what you may want to convey to the concerned party. The scientists explained this counter-intuitive finding by pointing to migraine patients having lowered levels of the brain chemical serotonin that is known to have a seesaw relationship with sexual desire: down serotonin, up sexual desire.

Medical science has not just made advances in areas linking headaches and desire; it has also homed in on the geography of desire itself – the female one. A BBC report by Sharon Mascall last June 11 featured an Australian urologist named Dr. Helen O’Connell, who has been working to rewrite the anatomy of "Venus’ pleasure." The history of human anatomy has always assigned the "press button for mayhem" approach to female sexual desire, born out of many centuries of clueless male scientists laboring over where the coveted spot is in the female map, using equally clueless dissected corpses. But Dr. O’ Connell says modern medical science now has, at its disposal, the tools to follow "fire" as it "burns" by using modern approaches like MRI to revisit and plot the entire geography of a woman’s pleasure as opposed to confronting the "ashes" left in corpses. This kind of modern science’s revisiting of a woman’s geography of pleasure revealed its extent, much further inland from just the "little hill" (that is what the Greek word "kleitoris" means), which for centuries was used to mark the spot, to a reach that makes for a southern republic! I take my hats off to Dr. O’ Connell who think that redrawing anatomy in medical science would really spell a difference in the way a woman’s pleasure is mapped in most men’s heads. Most men behave like the man video-captured driving a family car inside a horse racetrack, with a woman’s voice sympathetically heard saying, "There goes another man refusing to ask for directions…"

I wonder what snails would say if they could react to the news about snails that I just mentioned. The NY Times article by Henry Fountain last June 6 reported some fascinating stuff about how precise snails are in shooting their arrows of love and mind you, I am not even being literary when I say "arrows of love." Indeed, scientists Dr. Chase and Katrina C. Blanchard recently report in the journal The Proceedings of the Royal Society B that snails know exactly where the spot is that they can even throw darts at it from afar. Apparently, before mating, snails shoot off some kind of calcium dart onto the head of their "beloved" not intended to give her a headache but to safeguard the integrity of their forthcoming sperm. It is not the calcium but its mucus coating that acts as some kind of "stopper" at the opening of the digestive tract of the snail, which has enzymes that mistake the sperm for some kind of condiment for digestion, thereby destroying the sperm. What is even more interesting is that some snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they are both male and female in one body, which makes them arrow shooters and receivers at the same time. Can’t wait for National Geographic to capture in video the snails’ cupid’s arrow fair, to the tune of the William Tell overture. Imagine, we use "snail’s pace" to imply the very slow progress of anything and yet, it took men many centuries to know the geographical extent of a woman’s desire even up close and here we have snails for thousands of years, shooting love darts at a distance with utmost precision and skill.

Oh, and as if by design to join the snails and crush the egos of conceited name-calling humans, the millipedes have also recently presented themselves to science to show us that just because we named them "millipedes" does not necessarily mean they should really be so, that is, have a thousand legs! In fact, in a timing and manner that the superstitious would feast on, the journal Nature reports that the recent ones found in California had 666 legs (previous finds reached up to 750)! Well, what do you know, the bringer of Armageddon turned out to be a leg-a-geddon and it is female! Scientists were, of course, quick to ask this leggy omen, known to science as llacme plenipes for comments as to its revelatory future, but only to be told that aside from the plans of the female millipede to continue growing to about 1.3 inches long after the male millipede has stopped at .6 inches and with only 402 legs, no further comment from the leggy creatures could be had. I think we can elicit more data from the millipedes in exchange for the name of the lazy human who first called them "millipedes" without actually counting what it implied.

Downloading all these recent news in science reminded me that I belong to a curious club of conceited, careless bipeds, capable of causing unbelievable occurrences of headache in myself, in others, and probably in other creatures. But there is no cure to this kind of headache, except understanding and a willingness to bonk ourselves on the head if clearly, idiocy, superstition and laziness are limiting our understanding of ourselves, each other and the world. Be open and willing to bonk yourself for this. It is probably the only headache that will be worth it.

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