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Wellness Wednesday for May 31, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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This is interesting, I was under the impression that steroid creams could not treat frenulum breve. My phimosis itself is actually relatively mild, I can retract with no issue, it just pinches the head when I'm erect and doesn't slide up and down during sex. The frenulum breve is much worse and causes most of my issues. Your case seems worse than mine (unless your frenulum is longer) so if you solved yours with creams and stretching maybe that's a safe route for me. Is there any downside to trying a less invasive approach first? Just thinking out loud here but I guess I could try:

In this order:

  1. stretching exercises

  2. stretching exercises with steroid creams (the steroid concentration is quite low and shouldn’t affect my body outside of making the skin stretchier)

  3. frenuloplasty (where they reshape the frenulum to lengthen it slightly)

  4. frenulectomy (where they just remove it)

  5. circumcision as a last resort if that fails after several months

I certainly can't think of any downsides of trying the less invasive options first. It may be that your frenulum breve is worse than mine was, I don't know. I'd try to find a urologist that seems sympathetic to wanting to remain as intact as possible and see what they think about the feasibility of these options given your particular anatomy.