Psychosexual medicine as it is understood in great Britain in the 1990s has come a long way from its roots in family planning, when the patient was usually a woman attending on her own. Help is now offered to men and to couples. Seminar training and research has furthered doctors’ understanding of body-mind doctoring, and [...]

Examples of situations alerting the doctor to a hidden agenda are given by Freeling and Harris (1984). Nonverbal cues may be obtained from the patient’s gestures, posture and dress, reflecting an emotional state she or he does not mention. Or the patient’s opening gambit may be a general question rather than a statement about the [...]

Blair described how giving up the oral contraceptive pill may be a signal of emotional fears and other difficulties such as the relationship with the partner (Blair, 1983). She reported on patients who were requesting termination of pregnancy who had taken the Pill and either given up or taken it irregularly. Some of these patients [...]

The essence of most definitions of the word ‘counselling’ is that the patient is helped to review their own situation and make their own decisions. Such an understanding is central to the idea of sterilization counselling, but there are other imperatives for doctors who are discussing sterilization with their patients. In the first place they [...]

The commonly held belief that Asian women are uncomfortable about touching their genitals is belied by the observation that many of them have completely shaven vulvae. Clearly with this family, knowledge about cultural norms was no help to the doctor who had to feel a careful way towards the individual wishes of each member. Nor [...]