SEXUALITY, ILLNESS, AND HEALTH: HAVING A HEALTH PROBLEM AND NOT FEELING GOOD AND FEELING GOOD AND HAVING A HEALTH PROBLEM
Having a health problem and not feeling good. Just as times of being and feeling healthy are transitional phases of life process, so it is with times of sickness. All life systems go through periods of change, adaptation, “breakage,” wearing out, and responding to internal and external challenges to our immune system. At such times, we may feel terrible, because this is nature’s way of telling us that some response or alteration within our system is taking place. Sex is affected at these times, too, and can even help us through such crises by helping mobilize our internal natural healing processes.
Feeling good and having a health problem. We can thrive even when we are sick, particularly if we remember that sickness is part of health, part of the natural rhythm of life. Our health-conscious society has mistaken wellness for absence of medical problems, resulting in a defensive approach to daily living, a “preventive” life-style of running from the fear of illness. We must learn not only to live “well” even when we are sick, but to rally in the face of challenges to our system. Sex can be one of the most constructive ways of dealing with illness, yet few doctors provide prescriptions for love. In fact, most hospitals seem to go out of their way to prevent intimacy, the healing touching we all need when we are sick-
If we consider sex the sole prerogative of the “totally well,” of us are going to miss out on the most fulfilling of life’s opportunities. Sickness is affected by sex as much as it affects sex, and I hope this chapter will help in clarifying this vital life relationship As a starting point, I provide a Sexual Health Status Examination the equivalent of the annual physical exam. The problem with the physical exam is contained in the name of this procedure. It is “physical” and tends to ignore the mind/spirit/body/feeling interrelationship. It is an “exam” instead of a learning experience, a test without a lesson. Even though the word “doctor” itself derives from a root word meaning to teach, too few physicians actually teach anything at the physical examination. If a problem is found sex is seen as, according to one physician, “the last thing patients should be thinking about when they are sick.” Actually, we may be sick partly because sex is one of the last things we are thinking about.
*260\97\8*
Random Posts
Categories: General health
