Most recent international health newscast in addition to examination from our health explore band.

In our eagerness to correct the old misconceptions, we do need to be wary of falling into the trap of replacing one assumption with another — that all older people want to continue to be sexually active and that every one of us will have sexual needs until the day we die. One thing is true. We are all individuals. Some people will keep their interest in sex as they get older, but there are others who are quite happy to lose the urge as other aspects of their lives take precedence. Of course there are still others who never liked it much anyway and that’s not likely to change.

What might change is the way you want to express your sexual feelings. Harold is in his sixties. He explains, ‘In many respects the peaks of intense sexual feelings are not as keen as in my younger years and I’ve certainly slowed up. Although I still have orgasms, touching, companionship and just being close have become much more important than in my youth.’

One of the inevitabilities of growing old is the prospect of separation from your partner because of illness or death. Losing the person who has shared your most intimate moments is devastating. If you ask someone who is recently widowed what they miss the most, it’s often the little things like the Sunday morning cup of tea, or curling up on the lounge to watch television, asking their opinion on a flower arrangement or tucking up in bed together on a stormy night.

Molly, widowed at fifty-two, and now in her seventies frankly says, ‘I’d vomit if another man touched me. When I was young I was brought up to believe that you had one partner for life arid if anything happened to him that was the end of your sex life for good. You just can’t change the sort of ingrained idea that it would be somehow unfaithful to his memory to start seeing someone else. My friends tried to match-make me with any Tom, Dick or Harry but I just wasn’t interested. I found the most difficult time to cope was in bed at night. I would just miss knowing he was lying next to me in the bed. Sometimes even now I wake up and think I can hear him breathing. I was grieving so much at the time that sex was the last thing on my mind. When I started getting over the grief I never seemed to get my interest back. When I get miserable I get by with a hot bath and putting lots of pillows in the bed. I get a lot of affection and love from my daughter and my grandchildren.’

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Comments (0) Mar 23 2009

For some people, sexual stimulation of any sort is unpleasant. Sexual aversion is the extreme lower end of the libido scale. Far beyond indifference or simple disinterest, sexual aversion is a feeling of revulsion at any genital contact and can cause anxiety serious enough to lead to full-blown panic attacks. The reasons for this are necessarily complex because our reactions (whether positive or negative) to any sexual situation are the sum total of a lifetime of experiences. Such serious negative reactions might follow bad sexual experiences in the past, like child sexual abuse or rape. If a child is given negative messages about sex in their formative years, like being punished for masturbation, they can learn that sexual feelings are dirty or wrong. For others it’s not so much sex itself but the consequences that can lead to aversion. An accidental pregnancy or abortion can leave you feeling pretty negative. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to pick up a sexually transmitted disease it can turn you off sex, particularly if the disease or its treatment was especially painful or unpleasant, like herpes, pelvic inflammatory disease or genital warts.

Anxieties about touching around the vagina can lead to a problem called vaginismus. This is when the muscles around the opening of the vagina go into a spasm that is so tight that intercourse hurts or is simply impossible. This can put a big strain on the relationship and more anxiety means more spasm. Vaginismus is a problem where treatment has a high success rate.

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Comments (0) Mar 23 2009

Childbirth is an intensely moving experience. For parents, it feels like the climax of pregnancy and labor but it’s really just the beginning. Any couple will tell you having a baby really changes things. Where there was a partnership of two, now there is a third party. Loved, yes. Wanted, yes. Cute, absolutely!

But whichever way you look at it, having a baby means bringing a third person into your relationship and that is bound to be one of its greatest tests. It can be a complete disruption or an opportunity to rediscover each other — emotionally and sexually. Fran said, ‘Greg and I were together for seven years before we had Amy. I thought I knew everything about him but seeing him as a father showed me a whole new side to his character. I used to love to just watch him hold her and talk to her, and the way she responded to him. I fell in love with him all over again.’ Now while this may be the ideal outcome, having a new baby does force both partners to reassess their sexuality in the context of their whole relationship. It is a major landmark.

Just how much a relationship is affected will depend on the state of the relationship before the pregnancy. It’s not unusual to hear of couples having a baby to try to patch up a shaky relationship. These ‘Bandaid babies’ do no more than hide the damage for a while, distracting them from the real issues. Unless the underlying problems in the relationship are dealt with, this solution is doomed to be temporary and ultimately unsuccessful.

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Comments (0) Mar 23 2009

It can be particularly difficult for someone who has been in a relationship for many years. A woman in her late fifties said, ‘My husband left over five years ago and I have been on my own ever since. Earlier this year I met a man through some mutual friends and we started seeing each other regularly. It may seem a bit silly at my age but I am thinking about having sex with him. I know he is interested. Obviously I don’t need to worry about contraception anymore but I have heard about it being important to use condoms these days. Trouble is, I have never seen one and I am too embarrassed to go into a shop and buy them.”

Thinking about new relationships after years with the one partner can be nervewracking. It’s not just the safer sex issues but the etiquettes of dating, and the skills that go with getting to know another person intimately. People in this situation know how Rip Van Winkle must have felt. Facing decisions and social situations for the first time in decades would be like emerging from a time machine.

This can be doubly difficult if you don’t have a trusted and respected friend or family member to talk to. For both men and women it is hard to admit to ignorance or relative inexperience.

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Comments (0) Mar 23 2009

One condition that is not usually thought of as a sexually transmissible disease is the abnormal Pap smear. I have called it a sexually transmissible disease because over the past few years certain strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV or wart virus) have been implicated as a cause of precancerous and cancerous changes of the cervix and, like warts anywhere on the body, these are contagious. The reason the test is so valuable is that it can detect the changes in these cells before they become cancerous. Some women hate the idea of exposing their genitals to this kind of examination, but most seem to see it as a necessary inconvenience. One thing most women don’t expect is an abnormal result, and it can be a major trauma for them sexually. One British study actually looked at the effects of an abnormal Pap smear needing treatment and found that it influences most aspects of a woman’s sexual attitudes and responses, including less intercourse, decreased sexual arousal and fewer orgasms. More importantly they found that these women often became hostile towards their regular partner.

One of the tricky things about genital warts in men is that they can be hard to find. We need to use a technique called the ‘vinegar test’. Vinegar is a chemical called acetic acid and when it is applied to the skin of the genitals, warts will show up white. It may take magnifying equipment to see them properly and you really have to know what you’re looking for, so this is not a test you can do at home (in case you’re tempted to go and soak your penis in vinegar to prove a point). Doctors get all sorts of reactions to this like, ‘Now I know how a cucumber feels in a salad’ or ‘Aren’t you going to throw in some olive oil and a few herbs?’.

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Comments (0) Mar 23 2009