epublishing store: Intro

Sexual Health eBook Volume4
Chapter 14

Iatrogenic Causes of Female Sexual Disorders, Elizabeth A. Baron-Kuhn & Robert Taylor Segraves

When students graduate from medical school, part of the ceremony has traditionally included the Hippocratic oath. This of course states the ideal of causing no harm to the patient. As medicine has become so much more technologically based, the potential to inadvertently cause harm has increased markedly. Today, we have many therapies that are truly effective, but often, these treatments have a greater possibility of side effects. The doctor treating his patients really is still committed to doing no harm, but today, may not even be aware of all the potential side effects. The concept that therapies may cause sexual side effects is relatively new, and sadly, it is still often an uncomfortable thing to ask patients about. Hopefully, this chapter will provide some insight into the impact that our therapies can have on female patients’ quality of life.

This chapter will focus on the iatrogenic causes of female sexual disorders (negative effects of therapy that inadvertently occur during the treatment of a medical condition), and for the purposes of this chapter, the actual existence of female sexual disorders will be assumed. Because of the current political debate concerning whether female sexual disorders are real or are created by the pharmaceutical industry, we will use a patient-driven model. For our purposes in this chapter, any patient complaint of a detrimental change in sexual function occurring after a medical or surgical therapy will be considered iatrogenically caused female sexual dysfunction. We will follow the currently accepted classification developed at the First International Consensus Conference on Definitions of Women’s Sexual Dysfunction in 1998: Disorders of arousal, desire, and orgasm, and pain disorders (Basson et al., 2000; see the appendix in this volume). The term sexual disorders for women is preferred rather than sexual dysfunctions . This terminology was recommended at the World Association for Sexual Health World Congress held in Montreal in 2005.

Further, this chapter will be organized by medical and surgical treatments rather than by disorder type, as many of our current disease treatments can cause disruption of more than one aspect of sexual function. For the purposes of this chapter, we will also assume that all the patients, prior to a “therapeutic instrumentation,” had acceptable sexual function as assessed by the patient and that no intervening relationship issues are involved. Although, when evaluating a patient, one would certainly assess all aspects of the patient’s complaint.

Sexual Health eBook Volume4 Chapter 14 $20

Back to the list