this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Micropenis is typically noticed in the initial physical exam after birth. The upper limit for that criteria is about half of the typical/normative, so it's visually distinct even at birth. It's not determined by erect length at all.
Penises do grow over time, no matter what size they start, but there's limits to how much. Even as puberty hits, someone with a micropenis will only get so much extra because of the underlying limitations of the tissues. If someone of normative length gets a 10% change (as an example, I don't recall the actual number ranges for pubertal changes), that same basic range is all the person with a micropenis is going to get too.
And you're exactly right, it has next to zero impact on long term relationships. I wanna say that out of maybe fifteen or sixteen patients I had that fit the criteria, all but three had kids. So it's definitely not a barrier to sex at all. The one patient I had that was unusually talkative about it (most of them would just state the fact and describe any special needs they'd have for bathing, then never mention it again) said that once he read "the joy of sex" and learned how to do oral, he and his wife did fine, which she said was true as well, fwiw.
Ah, thank you for the explanation!
It might just have "turned" micro afterwards, with a combination of a bunch of stuff, like them being a grower, the person putting on weight and also losing libido.
Well, no, not really.
Being a "grower" isn't the same thing at all.
Someone putting on weight could be called buried penis. Totally different thing as well.
Libido loss doesn't have anything to do with the penis itself, directly. There may be an underlying hormonal issue that causes both, but that's still different. And, sometimes people with micropenis may have psychological issues with their penis that interferes with libido as well. But, again that's not the same thing.
And, no, it doesn't "turn" micro later. By definition, it's an inborn thing. It would be called something else if it happens later in life.
The most recent research into this is barely a year old, but it only backed up and refined previous information; this stuff has been documented and studied since at least the seventies, since that's when the first surgeries for altering the condition took place. And that's just as far as I know currently.
It's maybe one of those things where there's a gap between the actual definition of a medical term and the colloquial usage, but I'm going off of the medical version. Again, from that standard, it is inborn, with the key factor in causing it being hormonal abnormalities in utero. The reasons for those hormonal issues are varied, and may have other symptoms after birth, but for it to be micropenis instead of something else, it's an in utero malformation.
I meant that the person on that image could be describing themselves as having a micro penis because of those things instead of actually having a micro penis. That's why I placed the word "turn" in quotes.