Losethem (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:16 pm Like others here have stated, I did not get castrated for any sort of benefit to increase lifespan. For me it was a choice to make my life worth living. If I get a bump in time on earth from it, so be it. I am taking HRT (testosterone), so I don't know if I'll get any bump or not.
There is one case of a person not living long after their castration. I'm sure many people here remember a user named Luvpain who died, I think, within a year of his castration. If memory serves he had other medical issues, so his may not be the best example to use in this lifespan conversation. I only bring him up because he is an example of a shorter lifespan after castration, but there is no saying if in his case he wouldn't have passed on if he had not been castrated.
Then you get guys like me (I'm coming up on 6-years post-castration in a week or so), others that have been so for 25 years, etc. Anecdotal evidence there suggests that castration makes no impact on lifespan at all.
This is a question that will probably remain unanswered until someone with legitimate scientific credentials decides they want to look into it.
--LT
As mentioned in my introductory posts, I am a state-licensed professional and I have, as much as anyone else has,
regarding the issue of castration and life expectancy, and I had adequate competence to unriddle this issue before I came of voting age. The difficulty I have as a member of the Eunuch Archive is connected with the nature of my ongoing research and publication effort, ethical aspects of human subject scientific research, and the norms of the Eunuch Archive as a community of diverse people who share some aspect of life experience which departs, in varying amounts, from some of the social norms of human society when society is understood in the manner, form, and function of an entity.
To make scientific sense of life expectancy and castration, in my view, takes a goodly amount of scientific training and expertise, and the most useful words, for me if for no one else, are predominantly of quasi-unintelligible scientific jargon; one scientific jargon word may suffice for for usefully representing the content of several scientific treatises.
There is genotype and there is phenotype, and there is genetic expression and genetic expression penetrance. Genetic expression is the result of the interaction of genotype with environment (both internal and external), and is a property of an individual member of a species. Penetrance is a property of a group of people who share some particular gene or gene pattern and is a group, not an individual, property; the proportion of particular genetic pattern group members whose expression of the gene, given the gene, can be grouped into a particular cluster of identified genotype-pattern members.
"Life expectancy" is a property of a cluster of genotype/phenotype/inner-environment/outer-environment interactions, and is, if studied in sufficient detail, with regard to a specific individual, is of the nature of unfathomably immense analytically trans-computational difficulty. Sufficient familiarity with Bayes-Theorem statistical methods is the only way I have ever stumbled upon to even usefully ponder this sort of question. Frequentist statistical methods tend to lead to rejecting the necessary data because such data is, especially at the the typical, and rather commonplace 0.05 statistical-significance/statistical-insignificance boundary, essentially entirely an assortment of outliers such that the relevant data is, by frequentist statisticians, ordinarily trashed prior to crunching the numbers. For me, the beauty of Bayes Theorem is, put simply, that there are no outliers. On the other hand, getting scientifically useful priors is often an unresolvable predicament with Bayesian methods.
I can pour out scientific jargon prodigiously. I find that plausibly a path usefully avoided to the extent that my doing so would isolate me from others here who are not particularly autistic in the way I am.
Rather than flaunt my autism, I prefer to mention it, as though in passing, and explore whether I have anything anyone else may find of some merit which I can actually write.
More than 25 years after my orchiectomy, there is no way on earth or elsewhere whereby I would welcome "normal" testosterone levels back into my life. My experienced quality of life and my ability to work in what seem to me to be socially productive ways have been much higher before puberty and after orchiectomy than between those two life-altering events.
Had I known for sure, which was quite perfectly impossible, how much my life quality would seemingly improve after my orchiectomy, I surely would have not been nearly as cautious regarding getting the orchiectomy as I was. I did not, without possible error, know whether the "radical-vasectomy doctor" would make a blunder and I would die during the surgery. I did not know whether another driver would have a fatal stroke while driving toward me after my orchiectomy, such that I would have been killed on the way back home after the surgery. Life, at least for me, involves making choices the outcomes of which are impossible to accurately understand in advance of the outcomes. And choices keep happening because the neurons in my brain are alive and, in whatever pattern actually happens, experiencing post-synaptic membrane depolarizations and action potentials (or, if one prefers, nerve impulses). As long as nerve impulses are happening in my brain and as long as brain nerve impulses sometimes activate motor neurons, I am, at the cellular level, making choices. Whether I have a conscious clue about the cellular choices my brain and the rest of my nervous system are making is a rather akin to a horse of another colour.
I deem a written diatribe by me about free will, disciplined will, will training, determinism, choice, cellular biology and a raft of hosts of other stuff that intrigues me is without much merit here, and, for all I understand, might qualify me for being silenced.
The question of an individual person's life expectancy with regard to castration is unfathomable, and is so because life expectancy is a group, and not an individual, concern or property. While the characteristics of a group may be deduced through summing or superimposing the properties of the individual group members, that is not commutative; one cannot deduce the properties of an individual member of a group from the properties of the group of which the individual is a member; and to infer an individual's properties from the properties of a group of which the individual is a (to me) member is a superb pathway to devastating forms of abuse.
Now, unlike before my orchiectomy, I understand how much better I experience my life; before my orchiectomy, I only had what I remembered of my life before puberty as an indicator; I understand as I now understand because I have lived for the past 25 (and a little more) years without testosterone. I guess that qualifies as "real life experience."
Physiology, as a field of scientific inquiry, has not changed all that dramatically, regarding the effects of testosterone, in the past hundred years. The data is out t here, from natal, neonatal, accidental, intentional and, violence-based testicle absence what testosterone tends to do regarding life expectancy. Sixty or so years ago, I found ample hints (hints may be as good as the data gets) of increased life expectancy as a result of low testosterone. A goodly chunk of those hints may lurk in the observed greater life expectancy of women.
Perhaps I can put my view in more clearly personal terms. Before my orchiectomy, I did not know how much better I would experience my quality of life without much testosterone. My life since my orchiectomy cured me of that form of ignorance. Had I known (something I find absolutely impossible) how much better I would find my life after my orchiectomy, my sense of cancer risk would still have been important, but not close to as important as my experienced quality of life.
Anecdotal evidence is, to me, no evidence at all. Perhaps that hints at my having
within the Archive community standards of message board personal anonymity. Or...
before age 45 or so. There seems to be some low quality evidence that depending on the age when chopped, (younger being more of a benefit) eunuchs may tend to fall somewhere between the averages for intact men and women.