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Family Doctors Find It Tough To Talk Sex With Patients

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on May 14, 2025.

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, May 14, 2025 — Sex is an important part of people’s health, but family doctors find it tougher to counsel and treat patients for sexual health matters, a new study says.

General practitioners are 77% less likely than OB/GYNs to inquire about sexual problems when taking a patient’s medical history, researchers report in the journal Menopause.

They also are 2.4 times more likely to consider diagnosing female sexual problems a difficult task, researchers found.

“We found that sexual problems were considered significant clinical issues, as both general practitioners and OB/GYNs reported that treating sexual problems is an important health care practice,” wrote the research team led by Dr. Anna Aromaa, a clinical lecturer in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Turku in Finland.

“Nevertheless, general practitioners inquired about sexual problems less frequently and identified more barriers that hindered bringing up patients’ sexual problems than did OB/GYNs,” researchers added.

For the study, they had 402 general practitioners and 299 OB/GYNs fill out a web-based questionnaire to assess how they approach sexual health problems among their patients.

General practitioners were also more likely to report barriers to talking over sexual health problems, compared to OB/GYNs, researchers found.

For example, the family doctors were 2.4 times more likely to cite “shortness of the appointment time” as a reason to not talk sex, and twice as likely to cite “personal attitudes and beliefs” or “lack of knowledge about sexual medicine.”

In every case, general practitioners were more likely to report having barriers than their OB/GYN counterparts, researchers said.

Researchers also found that older general practitioners were more likely to report difficulty in diagnosing female sexual problems and cite barriers in bringing up sexual problems, compared to their younger colleagues.

"This study highlights the known barriers that exist to asking women about sexual health,” Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The Menopause Society, said in a news release.

“It also shows that primary-care practitioners may struggle a bit more than our OB/GYN colleagues in doing so, likely for a number of reasons, including time constraints, lack of education on sexual health, and competing priorities during the visit,” added Faubion, who was not involved in the research.

“The fact that younger physicians were more likely to address sexual health concerns is encouraging, but there remain significant gaps that need to be addressed," she concluded.

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Posted May 2025

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