Injecting Semen Into Your Arm Does Not Treat Back Pain, Case Shows

Here is one way to make your back pain seem less of a problem. Create another medical problem.

[The *Irish Medical Journal* included a case report](http://imj.ie/semenly-harmless-back-pain-an-unusual-presentation-of-a-subcutaneous-abscess/) of a 33-year-old male patient who was suffering from continuing severe lower back pain after lifting a heavy steel object. During the physical exam, his doctor noticed a red swollen area in the patient’s right upper arm.

When the doctor questioned him about this area, the patient revealed that he was using an “innovative method to treat back pain,” in the words of the case report authors. What exactly was this innovation? Injecting his own semen into his own veins. Yes, his semen. Yes, injecting. Yes, into his veins. Yes, exclamation mark.

Apparently, every month for 18 straight months, he had injected at least one “dose” of his semen, using a hypodermic needle purchased online. While hypodermic needles purchased online typically do not include the warning, “do not use to inject your own semen into your own veins,” it is sort of implied. Most recently, he had given himself three semen “doses” into his veins and muscles.

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It is not clear from the case report whether the patient ever had sex ed, but inside your arm is not where semen usually goes. Dictionary.com does define innovative as “introduce something new or different.” So, yes, technically, this was an “innovative” treatment because, as the case report related, no medical doctor had told him to do this. However, “innovative” doesn’t necessarily mean “it works” or “you should do it” or “this makes sense” or “you won’t end up in the hospital if you do this.”

According to the case report, the area on the patient’s arm had become firm and hard after he had “failed multiple attempts at injecting the bodily fluid causing an extravasation of semen into the soft tissues.” In other words, he kept missing his vein so that the semen had been leaking into the body tissue around the vein, causing a collection of fluid surrounded by angry inflammation. Indeed, inflammation can be your body’s way of saying, “dude, what the heck are you doing?”

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Lab tests found signs of, surprise, surprise, an infection. That’s what tends to happen when you inject semen into your arm using a hypodermic needle purchased online. Therefore, the doctors started him on something that is more typically injected into the veins of your arm: intravenous antibiotics.

During the patient’s hospital stay, his back pain did improve. Thus, in a very roundabout way, the semen injections did eventually lead to his back pain getting better. However, this by no means should suggest that injecting semen into your arm is proper treatment for back pain or anything else for that matter. Plus, it wasn’t clear how permanent that improvement in his back pain was. The patient did eventually discharge himself from the hospital before getting all the proper treatments, such as a procedure to drain the fluid collection in his arm.

If this “semens” to you like a very unusual case, you are right. The case report authors couldn’t find much info on human semen injections for back pain or any medical condition when they searched PubMed, EMBASE, Google Scholar, and the Internet. Note: be very careful when you search for such a combination of words on the Internet. All they really found was [a 1945 report of scientists injecting semen under the skins of female rats and rabbits](https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0528.1945.tb07635.x). Yes, they could be innovative back in 1945.

In general, being innovative is easy. You just have to be one of the first or only people to do something. It looks like this 33-year old male patient may have fit that bill. By contrast, being innovative in a way that is actually beneficial is a lot more difficult. Needless to say (or needle-less to say), don’t inject your semen into your arm, whether or not you miss your veins. As a general rule, just because you have something, doesn’t mean that you should inject it into your or anyone else’s arms.