Question: In the hours or days following orgasm, what change (if any) do you observe in your symptoms?
Legend:
2: Greatly worsened
1: Slightly worsened
0: No change
-1: Slightly improved
-2: Greatly improved
Woman affected by this syndrome also react badly to orgasm, similar to men:
From this data we can interpret following:
- Around half of patients remain unaffected by orgasm
- Those that are affected tend to get worse, some greatly so
- These observations are consistent across all observed drugs
We will be looking into what other metrics correlate with this interesting reaction to orgasm.
Comparison with POIS
Postorgasmic Illness Syndrom ( POIS ) is a syndrome which is diagnosed with the following criteria:
- One or more symptoms from among these seven symptom clusters:
- General cluster: extreme fatigue, exhausted, palpitations, problems finding words, incoherent speech, dysarthria, concentration difficulties, quickly irritated, cannot stand noise, photophobia, depressed mood.
- Flu-like cluster: feverish, extreme warmth, perspiration, shivery, ill with flu, feeling sick, feeling cold.
- Head cluster: headache, foggy feeling in the head, heavy feeling in the head.
- Eyes cluster: burning, red injected eyes, blurred vision, watery, irritating, itching eyes, painful eyes.
- Nose cluster: congested nose, watery, runny nose, sneezing.
- Throat cluster: dirty taste in mouth, dry mouth, sore throat, tickling cough, hoarse voice.
- Muscle cluster: muscle tension in back or neck, muscle weakness, painful muscles, heavy legs, stiffness in muscles.
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Symptoms begin from within a few seconds to within a few hours after ejaculation that occurs during coitus, masturbation, or nocturnal emission.
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Symptoms occur after all or almost all ejaculations.
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Most symptoms last for about 2–7 days. 5. Symptoms disappear spontaneously, that is, without treatment.
Strashny, Alex. „First Assessment of the Validity of the Only Diagnostic Criteria for Postorgasmic Illness Syndrome (POIS)“. International Journal of Impotence Research 31, Nr. 5 (September 2019): 369–73. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-019-0154-7.
The above chart illustrates which percentage of patients reporting worsening of symptoms after orgasm is in full compliance with POIS diagnostic criteria as outlined above. “Y” means full compliance, “N” means partial or no compliance. Most responses are at least partially compliant (data currently not shown). Often, not even POIS cases are in full compliance (see Strashny paper), so the above numbers are pretty impressive and shows considerable overlap with PFS, PAS, PSSD, etc.
Of interesting note, affected woman react badly to orgasm as well, the female pie chart is almost identical to the male one, i.e. a large proportion of woman fulfill POIS diagnostic criteria. Supposing POIS is similar to “our” syndromes at some biological level, the theory of sperm allergy wouldn’t make much sense 