According to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, people who engage in regular sexual activity gain several health benefits, such as longer lives, healthier hearts, lower blood pressure, and lower risk of breast cancer.
But approximately 33 percent of women may not receive these benefits due to low sexual desire. Also, the marriages of women with low sexual desire may also be at risk, according to recent statistics.
Some doctors are prescribing testosterone patches for women with low sexual desire. However, research shows that testosterone patches might increase the risk of breast cancer when used for just a year. Researchers are currently testing a new drug, flibanserin, which was developed as an antidepressant and affects neurotransmitters in the brain, to treat women with low sexual desire. But experts are concerned about the side effects of this possible treatment too.
Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence that a low-cost, risk-free psychological treatment is effective and may be a better alternative to drugs that have adverse side effects.
Low sexual desire is the number one problem women bring to sex therapists, and drugs to treat low sexual desire may take the focus away from the most common culprits of diminished desire in women, including lack of information on how our own bodies work, body image issues, relationship issues and a stressful lifestyle. Previous researches have also demonstrated that relationship issues are far more important in predicting women's sexual desire, than are hormone levels. Before women seek medical treatments, they should consider psychological treatment, according to researchers.
Professor Laurie Mintz has authored a book based on this idea, where she suggests a six-step psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioural treatment approach that she based on scientific literature and more than 20 years of clinical knowledge. The treatment plan includes chapters about one's thoughts about sex, how to talk with your partner, the importance of spending time together, ways to touch each other in both erotic and non-erotic ways, how to make time for sex and different ways to make sexual activity exciting and thus, increase women's sexual desire.
For a study demonstrating the effectiveness of this treatment, married women between the ages of 28 to 65, who said they were uninterested in sexual activity, were recruited. It was noted that, on average, women who read the book increased their level of sexual desire by almost 30 percent.
The finding is especially exciting because low sexual desire among women has been not only the most common, but the least successfully treated of all the sexual problems brought to therapists. Apart from this, unlike medical treatments such as testosterone, there are certainly no known negative medical side effects associated with the treatment strategies in the book.
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