It has occurred to me that Vulcan must have some form of sex industry to handle those going through Pon Farr who aren’t currently married or otherwise involved. Otherwise, they’d have constant issues with violence from those suffering the “blood fever” whose spouse was far away, or had died, or for some other reason had no one to mate with.
Given Vulcan attitudes towards sex, it’s probably kept out of sight, and is only “officially” available to those experiencing their “Seven Year Itch,” but it has to exist, right?
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Seems logical
raises eyebrow
seven year itch
Wow - I had never put those two together before.
Anyway, Memory Alpja states that intensive meditation is also used to alleviate the problems associated with pon farr.
What doesn’t make in-universe sense to me is that the condition comes from a neurochemical cascade. Even in our time, we recognize many of these conditions and have targeted drugs and therapies for them. Surely a society that is medically and technologically more advanced than ours by orders of magnitude would be able to simply treat the condition.
As a plot point it makes sense, and Roddenberry both personally and as a person of his time saw things like brain processes as strange and mysterious. It allowed them to play with the still evolving character of Spock and with Vulcans in general. It allowed them to do that “put a human condition into an alien and turn it up to 11” kind of thing they loved so much. The same would go for Lon Suder, of course.
They just get really hand-wavey around medical questions.
Meditation had been shown to be less than effective (Tuvok and Vorik both tried and failed to use meditation to get through their Pon Farrs).
It seems that, in universe, something about Vulcan physiology also prevents medication from being particularly effective as well (also failed for both Tuvok and Vorik).
Coming from someone with an academic background in biology, the treknobabble in biology and medicine is pretty terrible.
There’s a concept called the neural correlates of consciousness that basically states that every thought, memory, emotion, or other mental process has a direct correlation with the wiring and states of the cells in your brain. We can debate on whether or not to include other body states or gut bacteria, but the essence of the argument is that there is no “mind” as a phenomenon apart from the brain. This being a more serious sub, I’d argue that something like transporter technology implicitly assumes this, since you arrive with the same thoughts, memories, and emotional states as you had when you were decompiled.
So you’d be able to say that the Vulcan amygdala becomes hypertrophic during pon farr due to signaling by some other physical brain structure and activates the limbic system which itself becomes hypersensitive to stimulation and so on. So you can govern your pointy-eared patient some space Xanax, which increases the effectiveness of Vulcan GABA, which calms them down. Or using your advanced knowledge of physiology that no doubt extends down to the level of quantum effects, find another avenue of intervention.
Basically, I’m acknowledging your point - it’s a necessary complication that makes for interesting plot lines - but it really doesn’t line up with a justifiable in-universe answer.
