BMJ 2004;328 (1 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7447.0-g
Editor's choice
Insights into intimacy
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Two qualitative studies in this week's journal provide insights into intimacy—one into the intimacy of sex, the other into the intimacy of the consultation between a patient and a general practitioner. Both are closed worlds where third parties can never quite know what happens.
John M Tomlinson and David Wright have used semistructured interviews to explore what erectile dysfunction means to men (p 1037). All the men had been treated and much of the originality of the study lies in half of the sample being selected because treatment had failed. Many men are devastated by the condition. Their manliness is taken away. "I associate getting an erection with being a man." "Nobody's going to have any respect for you if you can't get a hard-on." Sexuality was central to their lives.
Some men felt "old before their time" and imagined the condition to be irreversible. They felt that
Richard Smith, editor
rsmith@bmj.com
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