Hi everyone,
I am new to this forum, and I am from a city in East Asia. First of all, I would like to thank the creator of this forum and the efforts made by many people here, I have known much more about this disease now through this forum. I just can't express how relieved I am knowing more about my problem. I want to ask a question, but I would like to share something about myself for your information, you may just skip the next paragraph if you are not interested.
It is a bit hard to say when I started to discover something went wrong, because I stopped masturbation for some years before I started again. I accidentally discovered masturbation at the age of 10, without evening knowing how it was called. Then, in the next two years, I remember I often had headache and my head grew slightly abnormally large (which is a bit strange as it is not commonly found in other patients). I felt that something was wrong and I just stopped. I thought that masturbation itself caused my problem and I was fairly unhappy. Several years passed, I accidentally started it again. I was having another stomach disease, and my attention was paid to it and I somehow neglected the problems brought by my ejaculations. After several months, I also acquired anxiety disorder, as mentioned before, from that time, I always attributed my symptoms to my anxiety disorder and as you can guess, I failed to cure anything as it was not the true cause. Two years ago, I started to realize my symptoms had something to do with my masturbation. In fact, I experience muscle weakness, difficulties in concentration, difficulties in speaking, being agitated, increased anxiety, etc. I tried to search for information, and finally identified my problem -- POIS. Unfortunately, after 2 to 3 years of chronic ordeal, I became "accustomed to" being sick and forgot how nice being healthy was. I did not stop masturbation this time. But I have somehow waken up this year, and I want to change. I attempt to stop masturbating, it is kind of successful, I felt much better during the weeks with no masturbation. This month, I have some ideas about finding some treatments which I previously thought to be not available. I was kind of misled by Wikipedia because the descriptions (e.g. one patient tried, two patients tried) there led me to believe that the attempts are tentative and are done in laboratories only. Now, I know that there are some possible treatments that I can try, though I can only try after this semester ends. I am not sure whether they will work, but at least I have some hopes now. Over the last 5.5 years, I often feel frustrated because even though I am a hard-working person and I am willing to work hard to achieve more, I have to be restricted by this disease. Perhaps the world is sometimes quite ironical.
In fact, I would like to ask if there is anyone here who discovered something wrong (i.e. POIS, and I suppose you didn't know this term at that stage) with your masturbation in your adolescence, say the age range of 11-19, and if you wanted to consult a doctor, how would you or how did you tell your dad or other family members? Because it is sad that as a teenager, one doesn't have money to see a doctor, and must ask others for help. The reason I ask this is simply due to my meaningless reflection of the past, I just think about what I would do if I discovered it early on, and I wonder how others would do in such a situation.
