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  • What Causes a Hidden Penis?
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There's a large number of men who have what's called a buried or hidden penis. In other words, when they stand up or sit down, the penis just disappears, and you can imagine how psychologically devastating it is for a boy or a man to be in a locker room or be with a partner and his penis is hardly visible. The penis is still there but it's just hidden. It's hidden in skin. It's hidden in fat. It happens from many different causes. It can happen from gaining too much weight where you're fat. It can happen from a circumcision that's overaggressive where the skin just doesn't allow the penis to come out, it can be from aging where the skin and everything just kind of sags down. But there is really good surgery to correct that. If it's not corrected, then what can happen with the penis always hidden, it gets very damp and it gets chronically inflamed. And that can cause a lot of itching and discomfort and it actually can destroy the skin. In fact in the last five years, I've picked up three men that had cancer of the penis just because they had a hidden penis for 20, 30 years with the chronic irritation and inflammation.

The way it's done in most cases is you make a pubic incision and you get rid of the fat and you elevate the skin up and you suture the skin after the fat's removed down to the muscle, so the pubic area, so that now the penis is stabilized and can't go into the fat or the skin on the pubic area. And then, also, on the underside of the penis, I'll stabilize the skin to the penis on the underside, so that the man has four areas, two on the top, two on the bottom, where the penis is stabilized now to the skin because the problem that causes the hidden penis is that the penile skin is not attached to the penis. The skin and everything is going forward or down, and the penis is left behind.

So what you got to do is you got to pull everything back up, so now the penis is now one unit with the skin. It works great for self-esteem and for comfort.

What Causes a Hidden Penis?

Dr. Gary Alter explains what the term "hidden penis" means, the issues that can arise from a chronically hidden penis, and what can be done to correct the issue.