Persistence, planning, patience, and prevention: aspects of sex education in medicine.

This paper emphasizes the rapid response of American medical schools to the absence of sex education in their curricula, which has led to diversity of design, strategy, and evaluation of human sexuality courses. It further points out that most such courses are inadequate to teach physicians knowledge and skills that will be required when they leave medical school. Major areas of resistance to full implementation of comprehensive sex education programs are cited, with one method outlined to overcome institutional resistance. The authors cite case examples of the variety of sexual conflicts that become accessible in students and faculty as a result of such instruction. They suggest that groups of persons who are sexually knowledgeable and possess counseling skills in sex therapy could greatly improve sex education in the medical institution.