Counseling Patients with Sexual Concerns

Abstract

To provide comprehensive, family-centered medical care while maintaining continuity is a challenge for most family physicians. Adding the responsibility for sexual counseling to each office encounter seems too time-consuming, but sexual health has become a necessary subject to address at all phases of the life cycle. At the extreme example of need, a lack of awareness of the sexual transmissibility of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can mean a patient’s sexual behavior becomes a matter of life and death. A less extreme example is disappointment in a relationship because of uninformed or unreasonable expectations about sexual love-making. A sexual history should be obtained from each patient, giving the patient an opportunity to seek accurate information about sex in a nonthreatening, nonjudgmental encounter.