Foot Orgasm Syndrome. It might be an odd name for a medical condition but the first ever case has been reported by a 55-year old woman in the Netherlands.
The foot orgasm experienced by the patient was not brought about by any erotic thought or desire but it feels like a real orgasm achieved during a sexual intercourse.
According to the patient, she was confined in an intensive care unit about 18 months before the symptoms started. She was in the ICU due to a sepsis infection and part of her time there was spent in comatose. When she recovered, the burning and tingling sensation on her left foot started, initially attributed to a possible nerve damage on the extremity.
"She felt terrible about it," said Dr. Marcel Waldinger, a neuropsychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at the Utrecht University, in an interview with Fox News.
The woman worried about the embarrassing foot orgasms that occurs about six times a day. The patient reported that the tingling feeling starts from her left foot going to her left leg and vagina.
Waldinger and her team conducted a case study of the patient with foot orgasm syndrome published on the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Initial examination and imaging of the patient's foot and brain revealed no abnormalities. However, comparison of the nerve structures of her right and left foot showed differences.
The proponents of the study used transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to the left foot. The electric pulses to the left foot resulted to orgasm in the patient's vagina. Likewise, a stimulation of the vagina resulted to the foot orgasm.
The team of experts think that it might be a mix up of sensation that confuses the brain of the patient.
"The brain could not anymore differentiate between the foot and the vagina. So that it decided that every stimulus coming from the foot was actually coming from the vagina. And that means an orgasmic feeling," Waldinger explained.
According to Waldinger, the syndrome is not psychological. It is neurological and can be treated.
The foot orgasm syndrome most likely resulted when the brain did not receive inputs from the foot while continuing to receive sensation from the vagina, according to the doctors. When the nerve damage healed, the brain was not sure where it was coming from, since the nerve from the foot and the vagina enters the same level of the spinal cord.
The patient with the foot orgasm syndrome was treated by Waldinger with a shot of anesthetics to the spinal nerve responsible for receiving sensation from the foot. The footgasm stopped but she might need follow up treatments in case the condition reoccurs.
