Rebel Yells

Science Daily assisting with getting to the point

Actually when thinking back to my teenage years I have to say that I wasn’t that much of a rebel. I suppose I was tangentially linked to the mid eighties Goth scene if only from a sartorial if not a musical point of view. As regular readers will know I was (and still am) a big fan of the second gen. prog rock bands and at the time was in the process of discovering the genre had already had an outing 10 -15 years earlier and was even better then. So wearing ones hair long was a given. But leather trousers, fencing shirts, waist coats and oodles of belts, bangles and indeed eye make up was very much the order of the day.

The one thing I didn’t do though was get any piercing done. It seemed like a given though and friends even bought me some really nice ear rings in anticipation of the inevitable. And I really like the aesthetics of the whole thing. But the one thing that I couldn’t get passed was my unbelievably low squeamishness threshold.

Ergh it might hurt. Or worse the wound with even the best care and attention might get a bit manky. I remember on several occasions hanging around in the vicinity of a local jeweller who performed this minor surgery for hours trying to pluck up the courage to go in and get the job done. But on each occasion I just couldn’t do it and eventually trudged home again, crestfallen, to wistfully study the jewellery collection and promise myself that I might be just a little braver next time.

Of course the next time never ended in a different result and the offers made by friends to do the deed were politely but quickly rejected so the silver dragons, filigree crosses and near imperceptible scarring never came to adorn my ear lobes.

But the results of a recent study published in the British Medical Journal carried out by public health doctors from the Health Protection Agency still created a degree of interest, a small amount of self justifying vindication and a sneaking sense of admiration of the bravery / stupidity of today’s ‘kids’.

Apparently one in ten adults in England have had a piercing somewhere other than their ear lobe, with a quarter experiencing complications, and one in 100 piercings resulting in a hospital admission.

The survey found that piercing is more common among women than men, with nearly half the women (46.2%) surveyed aged 16 years having a body piercing. Of all the piercings in the survey a navel piercing was the most popular (33% - Yuck), followed by nose (19% -kind of OK), ear (13%- if you’re brave enough), tongue (9% - no ), nipple (9% hell no), eyebrow (8% absolutely no), lip (4% Nice cold sore ‘hun’) and genital (2% - Why? Which bit? How? Who? When? ).

The type of piercing also varied by gender with nipple piercing being the most popular among men but one of the least popular among women, while navel piercing was by far the most popular in women but was rare in men. Genital piercing, whilst uncommon and for some reason which I can’t quite fathom, was found to be twice as popular among men as women.

Four out of five piercings were performed in specialist piercing shops, with the researchers saying a "worrying" one in ten tongue piercings were performed by non-specialists. It seems that in every anatomical site, including the tongue and genital areas a number of people said they had performed the piercing themselves or they'd had it done by a friend or relative.

The most common problems with piercings were swelling, infection and bleeding, with tongue piercings being the most likely to cause problems and almost half resulted in complications. Serious complications were significantly, if not unsurprisingly, more likely to occur if the piercing had been performed by a non-specialist.

I begin to understand, if it can be taken as the actions of such, a rebel may well yell.

‘Needle averse of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your pains’.