A 15-year-old study has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately with a claim supposedly made by a couple of scientists/researchers. You may have seen the posts about an unnamed species of bright orange mushroom found in Hawaii causing spontaneous orgasms in a handful of women who smelled it.
But before you get too excited, put on your skeptical hat, there’s actually no proof that this mushroom does this, this claim comes from a one page study with a small sample size that has yet to be reproduced, great for clickbait, not great for factual science.
In 2001, a pair of medical researchers published a report in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms (hosted at http://www.begellhouse.com) describing the effects of an unnamed species of mushroom on volunteers.
Belonging to a genus of stinkhorn mushrooms, named as Phallus, the mushroom is said to only grow on top of the 600 to 1,000-year-old lava flows of Hawaii and it is described as particularly difficult to find.
The myth being that the mushroom’s scent is a powerful female aphrodisiac, the researchers decided to conduct a so-called ‘smell test’ on sixteen female and ten male volunteers. Six of the women reportedly experienced a mild orgasm when they sniffed the mushroom, while the remaining ten were found to have an increased heart rate when given a smaller dose. The male volunteers, on the other hand, all said they thought the mushroom smelled disgusting, and that was the extent of its influence on them.
The researchers reported that: “Indeed, nearly half of the female test subjects experienced spontaneous orgasms while smelling this mushroom. These results suggest that the hormone-like compounds present in the volatile portion of the spore mass may have some similarity to human neurotransmitters released during sexual encounters.”
Now for the problems with this new Facebook myth:
As for sample size: 26 people is too small a sample size to prove anything, particularly as 10 of them reported feeling nothing but grossed out. Also, other than measuring an increase in heart rate – which on its own doesn’t equal an orgasm – the researchers did little to prove that the self-reported orgasms actually happened.
And of course the results of an experiment cannot be seen as definitive until they are reproduced under a different set of conditions, and this has yet to be done. not to mention the lack of scientific evidence outside this study that an orgasm can be triggered solely by scent, if the researchers want to make that claim they’ve got a whole lot of work to do.
And most damning of all, the mushrooms were never identified, always called “unnamed” in any source we’ve looked up. If this were a real thing they would name it you’d think. We did find a few references to the “Woman’s Mushroom” AKA Phallus indusiatus. Found in southern Asia, Africa, Australia, and parts of South America, this phallus-shaped stinkhorn mushroom is said to be a female aphrodisiac in Hawaiian and South Pacific lore, referred to as Mamalo o Wahine (Woman’s Mushroom in Hawaiian). Of course it’s also possible that these woman may have known the reputation of the shroom in question and through the placebo effect have felt the supposed effects. But since the mushroom in the study is unknown we may never learn the full truth.
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