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Dr. Brotto shares why adaptation is the goal for sexual rehabilitation.
Dr. Brotto:
Adaptation, as opposed to cure, is really important because some of the things we just talked about, all of the different ways in which a medical illness affects a woman’s sexuality, they are not necessarily reversible. It’s not the case that, again, I keep going back to cancer, but there’s been so much research looking at sexuality and cancer.
You can’t go back and put a woman’s cervix back or put her uterus back or take her scar away or undo the effects of her heart attack or put her spinal cord back together so, by extension therefore we can’t have the belief that if a woman has a difficulty, you work on the difficulty and she’ll go back to where she was before. She is a fundamentally different person now after the medical illness.
So, we develop what is called the "new normal," a new place that involves improvement but it is not necessarily the place she was before. It’s also not necessarily less than she was before; maybe it's on a different scale altogether.
About Dr. Brotto, Ph.D., R. Psych.:
Dr. Lori Brotto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of British Columbia and a Registered Psychologist with the BC College of Psychologists. She conducts research on women’s sexual health and difficulties, develops and test psycho-educational interventions for women with sexual desire and arousal complaints, and studies additional sexual health topics including, culture and sexuality, hormones and sexual desire, cancer and sexuality, HPV and sexuality, and asexuality. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of British Columbia and trained at the University of Washington, completing a one-year internship in the Department of Psychiatry, and two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Reproductive and Sexual Medicine.
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