Ask the Doctor

Updated January 17, 2009.

This website has been running for some time now. Many of the questions that are sent in have already been answered. Before you send in your question, please read the past responses to see if your question has already been answered. You can browse responses by category, month and we have a site search. Also, please check the FAQ on this site, and on Dr. Karpman’s sites. If your question genuinely hasn’t been answered in the past, please read the following guidelines:-

• Please use the link below to submit questions – any questions posted in the comments field of posts may not be seen, or answered.
• Please let me know what name you want on the question if it’s selected for inclusion. If you want to have no name on the question, or a different name please tell me, otherwise I will usually use the first name as it appears on the email you send.
• We don’t promise to answer every question sent in, but we do promise that the questions selected to be answered will cover as many of the topics available as possible.
• Please be aware that responsible medical websites do NOT offer individual patient diagnosis. This page is in accordance with that convention. Dr. Karpman will answer questions in a non patient-specific manner that should be regarded as information, and not be regarded as individual patient diagnosis. Any information you read on this site should NOT be a substitute for seeking medical attention by a qualified physician.

Finally, what may help a great deal is if you can send a picture of any swellings, bruises, lumps and bumps along with the question. As well as posting them with the response to the question on this site, we may choose to use some of the photo’s on the vasectomy pictures page. All questions accompanied by pictures will be posted without a name to guarantee your anonymity and to comply with various decency laws all pictures shown will be cropped to show only the relevant details required in a clinical context.

Privacy Policy regarding information and photo’s you submit with a question:-

Sometimes visitors submit photo’s, lab reports and other information with a question. It’s important to know how we treat this information before you submit them with a question. Firstly, all pictures and lab reports etc. will only be seen by the webmaster and Dr. Karpman. We will never publish a scan of a lab report or any similar submission. We may however use information from it such as sperm count where it is relevant to the question. If a lab report is sent in as email text, again, we will only use the relevant detail.

When submitting photo’s please be aware that whilst we will double check you are OK with the pictures being used as part of the response to the question, we are assuming that by sending them in you are OK with publication, and they may appear on the website when the response is published. In some cases this might be before we have double checked with you. So if you are sending in pictures and wish them to be treated as not for publication, please make us aware of this when you submit them.
How to submit a question

To submit your question, please click here to send an email to Dr. Karpman via the webmaster. Selected questions will be forwarded to Dr. Karpman. Please be aware that responses are not instant. Dr. Karpman has a busy practice, and his work here is on a voluntary basis. Replies to selected questions may take a while.

Please do not email Dr. Karpman directly. He will not answer questions submitted directly, but will forward them back to me, and may delay the question getting answered.

Health On The Net accreditation
There are many sites on the internet offering medical information and patient support. Whilst many of them are excellent, unfortunately many of them are very poor, misguided and contain inaccurate information. When looking at websites that contain medical information, always look for membership of a universally recognised quality assurance scheme such as the HON Code from the Health On the Net Foundation. HON is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, accredited to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. It was founded over a decade ago, was one of the very first URLs to guide both lay users and medical professionals to reliable sources of health care information in cyberspace and has since become the most respected portal to medical information on the Internet. HON manually validates sites before accepting them as members, and regularly inspects member sites to ensure that they comply with the code of conduct. Dr. Karpman’s websites, and this website have all been awarded accreditation by the Health On the Net foundation.