“Millions Of Women Face Astonishing Pain When They Have Sex. Why Don’t Their Doctors Take Them Seriously?”
“Since no one seemed to believe her, she turned to self-medication, using information she found on a website describing vaginismus, a vaginal disorder known to cause spasms and the clenching of pelvic muscles. The recommended cure? A set of incrementally larger dilators that would, in theory, strengthen her vulvar muscles and eventually ease her pain.
So Jones sat in her bedroom and forced the instruments inside of her, starting with the smallest one. That it would even “go in,” she says, felt like a sign of progress. But her agony persisted, and the dilators seemed to have triggered a new problem: She felt like she had to urinate all the time…
When I looked up vulvodynia up on the internet, I found myself on YouTube, where the entire first page of results featured videos from the heavy metal band Vulvodynia, save for two exceptions: a well-intentioned man giving a flawed definition of vulvodynia under the guise of “health & wellness” (he recommends “avoiding intercourse” and bathing in baking soda) and a Pilates instructor named Laura Lehrhaupt dangerously claiming to have cured her vulvodynia with something called the Acid Alkaline Diet…
From the top down, reliable information about the condition and its causes isn’t readily available, which Mate attributes to the fact that vulvar pain treatment has a funding problem.
“It’s not taught in medical schools, it’s not taught in residency training programs, it’s not available as a topic at the NIH to have grants funded for,” says Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the director of a prominent Southern California clinic called San Diego Sexual Medicine, as well as the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health.
It’s frustrating, he says, that there are more vulvodynia cases than those of breast or even “prostate cancer…
last year, at her regular physical, Panzer’s determination for a healthy sex life with Barenboim spurred her to ask her internist offhandedly if pain during sex was normal. “Um, no,” the doctor told her. But he misdiagnosed Panzer with a partially torn hymen and sent her to an OB/GYN at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who told her the issue was psychosomatic.
“He said to me, ‘This is definitely in your head,’” says Panzer bitterly. “He was like, ‘I can see your hymen is broken; I think this is probably in your head.’ I was like, ‘Listen, I will tell a stranger I have this condition. It’s not in my head.’”…
Haunting the research of any women’s sexual dysfunction done by the NIH is that the Gynecological Health and Disease Branch is couched within the NICHD, which means that women’s sexual health studies are drawing from the same money needed to support obstetrics and pediatrics.”
A friend of mine has this diagnosis. Well, like, at least one — after I read this, I sent it to someone who had once described these symptoms to me. ~Tell your friends when you’re in pain~
I strongly recommend the essay on pain linked in the article — here’s my summary of it from a few years ago, it’s one of the best things I’ve posted.
Related: “Is Medicine’s Gender Bias Killing Young Women?”; “The Still-Misunderstood Shape of the Clitoris”; “The spy-camera gyno is every woman’s worst nightmare — and a wake-up call”; “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”
