Corpora cavernosa nerve penile plethysmographs measure changes in response to inter-operative[clarification needed] electric stimulation during surgery.
[3] In prostatectomy nerve-sparing surgery, the surgeon applies a mild electrical stimulation near the cavernous nerves of penis to verify their locations and avoid operative trauma.
At the surgery's conclusion, the electrical stimulation penile plethysmograph result is a prognosis which helps to manage the erectile function outcomes earlier than the many months required for recovery.
The surgical machine is supplied as CaverMap by Blue Torch Medical Technology, Inc. A roughly equivalent procedure for women, vaginal photoplethysmography, measures blood through the walls of the vagina, which researchers claim increases during sexual arousal.
Exact procedures can vary, but in one study a seventeen-year-old male sex offender was, at the start of each daily session, privately fitted with a Parks Medical Electronics mercury strain gauge attached to his penis and worn under trousers and underwear.
He was then driven daily to a college campus for multiple sessions to assess his sexual attraction to women and men, who were about 30–100 feet away from him.
This was repeated over a period of 24 days, with the results showing a significantly greater level of attraction to women, especially when research staff were discreetly absent.
I was of course opposed to this measure, but I still thought, as did my colleagues at the psychiatric university hospital in Prague where I was working, that homosexuality was an experientially acquired neurosis".
He then developed phallometry to replace psychoanalytic methods of assessment because "[P]sychoanalysis had turned out to be a failure, virtually unusable as an instrument for individual diagnosis or research....When phallometry began to look promising as a test of erotic sex and age preferences, we started using it mainly as a test of pedophilia, that is determining who has an erotic preference for children over adults".
[8] In post–World War II Czechoslovakia, Freund was assigned by the communist government the task of identifying among military conscripts men who were falsely declaring themselves to be gay to avoid the draft.
[9][10] "Freund (1957) developed the first device, which measured penile volume changes... to distinguish heterosexual and homosexual males for the Czechoslovakian army.
In 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition) of the American Psychiatric Association stated that penile plethysmography has been used in research settings to assess various paraphilias by measuring an individual's sexual arousal in response to visual and auditory stimuli.
"[16] In contrast, a 2017 recent meta-analysis provides support for the validity of phallometric testing as a measure of sexual interests in children across 37 samples and 6,785 individuals.
[17] In 1998, Hanson and Bussière published a comprehensive meta-analysis of 61 scientific reports on the prediction of sexual offenses spanning more than 40,000 individual cases.
[3] Another meta-analysis in 2005 of 13 studies and 2,180 individual cases repeated the finding that phallometric responses to children was a strong predictor of sexual re-offense.
[17] This meta-analysis extended previous meta-analytic research by showing phallometric responding to both male and female pedophilic and hebephilic stimuli predict sexual re-offence.
Meta-analytic research has shown that sexual offenders against children show greater responding on phallometric tests for pedophilia and hebephilia than controls.
In 1993, the doctrine was rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States in favor of a more comprehensive "reliable foundation" test in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals.
"[49] In State of North Carolina v. Spencer,[50] the court reviewed the literature and case law and concluded that penile plethysmography was scientifically unreliable: "Despite the sophistication of the current equipment technology, a question remains whether the information emitted is a valid and reliable means of assessing sexual preference."
[citation needed] Fedoroff and Moran called it an "experimental procedure" and noted, "Virtually every expert who has written about phallometry has cautioned that it is insufficiently sensitive or specific to be used to determine the guilt or innocence of a person accused of a sex crime.
[56] The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently addressed the procedures required before a federal supervised release program could include penile plethysmograph testing.
[57] The device is routinely used at civil commitment facilities, but "some clinicians and offenders say it is easy, particularly in a laboratory, to stifle arousal and thus cheat on a plethysmograph test.
600, which upheld a lower court's decision to exclude testimony by a psychiatrist who had administered several tests on the accused, including a penile plethysmograph: A level of reliability that is quite useful in therapy because it yields some information about a course of treatment is not necessarily sufficiently reliable to be used in a court of law to identify or exclude the accused as a potential perpetrator of an offence.
In fact, penile plethysmography has received a mixed reception in Quebec courts: Protection de la jeunesse – 539, [1992] R.J.Q.
of Psychiatry & L. 13.As of 2010, all youth in sex offender treatment programs administered by the Youth Forensic Psychiatric Service of British Columbia were offered a voluntary penile plethysmograph test to predict whether they can properly control their deviant arousal, or whether they will require medication or other forms of treatment.
"[62] Carroll and others cite the legality of the depictions of minors, as well as the constitutionality of requiring PPG for admission to jobs or the military, or in custody cases.
[63][64] In a 2009 report led by Robert Clift on use of the device on adolescent offenders,[65] the authors acknowledge in their conclusions that PPG tests "are problematic ethically and should be used only after therapists have carefully weighed the benefits versus the negatives.
"[66] The Minister of Children and Family Development closed the program examined in Clift's report in 2010 following complaints by civil rights groups.
"[71] The Czech Interior Ministry replied that the testing was conducted only after written consent has been obtained, and when it was not possible to use a different method of verification.