ABSTRACT
Beginning my career in sexual medicine after 15 years in internal medicine and family practice, I was honored to be asked to be involved in the teaching of human sexuality and its problems to medical students-teaching I myself had never received. We taught them how to respectfully and diligently enquire about their patients’ sexual function and dysfunction. We taught them how to manage erectile dysfunction, orgasm problems, and dyspareunia, but we made little mention of problematic low sexual desire, especially in women. I was advised by some colleagues that this is basically untreatable. Laumann’s published data were still some 8 years away-but I knew that in Vancouver, at least, concerns about their apparently abnormally low sexual desire were highly prevalent among women-were they really “untreatable”?
