Is this vasectomy season? It is if you believe what the Cleveland Clinic says.

According to the esteemed medical center, men are scheduling vasectomies so they can recover — it's usually just a day or so of resting and ice packs — in front of the television, watching March Madness.

"I'm doing them every 15 minutes tomorrow with no holes. It usually won't be that full," Dr. J. Stephen Jones, chairman of the department of regional urology at Cleveland Clinic, said Thursday. He said he noticed a couple years ago that vasectomies increased up to 50% during the NCAA basketball tournament.

He added that about half the patients he sees say they've timed their procedures to college basketball.

For the record, doctors here say they have not noticed a link between March Madness and vasectomies, though Dr. John Harding of the Michigan Institute of Urology, which has 20 local offices, said he recalls a couple patients who timed their procedures to the Super Bowl.

"It must be something in the water or the air in Ohio," said Dr. Riad Farah, a urologist at Henry Ford Hospital here who has done vasectomies for 42 years. "Where they came up with that theory, I have no idea. … I'm steady every week. It's a steady flow. I'm booked now through June."

Yet a urology practice in Richmond, Va., grabbed the URL www.vasectomymadness.com and is promoting the ability to "spend three days on the couch watching hoops with your wife's approval." Other urologists in Springfield, Ore.; Austin, Texas, and Longview, Wash., are among those are seizing the marketing opportunity.

Dr. Kenneth Peters, head of the urology department at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., said he's not experienced an uptick in vasectomies in his practice, either.

"Probably with the appropriate marketing we can make it a trend," he said.

---

(Contributing: Ryan Dean, KSDK-TV, St. Louis)