Hayfever? Just Blow Your… Knob

William K. L. Dickson for the Edison laboratory, Wikimedia Commons

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Health alert: Spring and hayfever go together like, well, sex and sneezes. All those flowers. All that green grass. Kachew.

But, guys, you get a break on this one. A neurologist from Tabriz Medical University in Iran proposes that a well-timed ejaculation will clear your bunged nose. Too.

The logic goes like this: the nose and genitals are both connected to the sympathetic nervous system that controls certain reflexes. A blocked nose is caused by swollen and inflamed nasal blood vessels irritated by an infection or by pollen in the air. But during ejaculation the sympathetic nervous system constricts blood vessels across the body. That should soothe the swollen nasal blood vessels, freeing the airway for deep, er, that is, normal breathing.

Sina Zarrintan, the neurologist, says he hasn’t actually tested this yet. Right, and the pope doesn’t have wet dreams.

But if it works, whacking off could offer many advantages over decongestant drugs, which can cause hypertension and make congestion worse over the course of a few days, writes Zarrintan in Medical Hypotheses.

He suggests masturbating or having sex whenever the symptoms are bad enough to warrant another ejaculation. And when aren’t they? The patient can adjust the number of intercourses or masturbations depending on the severity of the symptoms, he says. It’s the best scrip of all: Take as needed.

Work this in with a little sneeze fetishism and it gets downright fun to be miserable in the spring—if you’re a guy, that is. Global warming gets some much-needed kink.

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