Preventative health isn’t just for hearts and knees. Experts in sexual health wrote in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) that sexual health challenges are best met by shifting focus away from diseases and toward the promotion of wellness and health.
Authors of the JAMA Viewpoint, Sexual Health in America: Improving Patient Care and Public Health, include former Surgeon General David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., Edward W. Hook III, M.D., and Eli Coleman, Ph.D., director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota.
The piece lays out the case for making sexual health a public health priority: sexual health significantly impacts the overall health, happiness and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Still, sexual health is often approached from a model focused on diseases and negative outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and sexual assault.
The authors suggest embracing a comprehensive sexual health framework promoting health and wellness rather fixating on diseases.
The framework includes:
- An emphasis on wellness
- Focus on positive, respectful relationships
- Acknowledgment of the impact of sexual health on overall health
- An integrated approach to prevention
The authors say the shift in focus to wellness can help reduce shame and discrimination associated with sex-related conditions. By reducing stigma, a persistent barrier to care will be removed.
“Patients and providers alike are not comfortable raising the issues and the visits are often too short and crowded with other matters, so sexual health discussions suffer,” said Coleman. “This lack of communication harms not only sexual health care but also personal and sexual relationships.”
The Viewpoint supports enhancing efforts through overhauling service integration and bundling messages of positive sexual health with other common health discussions. The goal would be increasing efficiency of health care efforts, improving health for patients.
“There’s a clear link between sexual health and general health,” said Coleman. In the JAMA piece, the authors expand on this point, writing, “Sexuality fulfills an array of personal, reproductive, and social needs, which influence behaviors and affect health.
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Dr. Satcher is Director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Hook is Director, Division of Infectious Diseases and Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Dr. Coleman is Director and Academic Chair in Sexual Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Corresponding author is Dr. Coleman, Program in Human Sexuality, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota Medical School, 1300 S. Second St., Ste. 180, Minneapolis, MN, 55454 (colem001@umn.edu).
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