SEXUAL HEALTH: Pills that kill desire

When Rose walked into the consultation room with her husband Gabriel, she declared that their sex life had gone to the dogs.

“We’ve lost interest in each other. We rarely have sex. Is this normal for our age?” She posed.

Like many men in his situation, Gabriel said nothing, he just nodded in agreement. We see this a lot at the sexology  clinic. Men have a tendency to keep their sexual problems to themselves. Instead of addressing the problem, they turn to self-destructive habits like drowning their worries in alcohol, burying themselves in their work or having an affair, just to escape from reality. Women on the other hand, are good at articulating their issues and for this reason, they are often the saving grace in dying relationships.

So back to the issue at hand, I assessed the couple for possible causes of low libido. Relationship problems are the commonest causes of impaired sex drive, so I started by assessing Rose’s and Gabriel’s relationship. My interrogation yielded nothing in that line of thought. The couple seemed to be in perfect relationship health.

SEXUAL VALUES

I switched to asking about the couple’s sexual values. What you learn about sex in your family, either through the spoken word or by observing sexual behaviours in the family, models your world view on sex and can make sex an exciting adventure or a despised chore. Once again this yielded nothing relating to the problem at hand. Both Rose and Gabriel had great upbringing with positive sexual values.

Having failed to elicit a cause of the couple’s problem thus far, I focused my attention to medical problems that are known to have a negative on sexual desire. I discovered that Rose had been diagnosed with depression and had been on treatment for years. Gabriel, on the other hand, had hypertension. I took to exploring these medical issues further.

In depression, one losses interest in everything. They feel hopeless, useless, sad and worthless. They see no value in life and lose interest in sex. Rose had been on a drugs to treat her condition for three years. The drug was one known to alter chemicals in the brain causing a rise in a chemical called serotonin. Serotonin dampens sex desire by blocking parts of the brain that cause desire for sex. Rose had a disease that is known to cause loss of sexual desire and the medicine she used to treat her condition dampened the desire further.

HYPERTENSION

Gabriel on the other hand was on treatment for hypertension. He was using a drug falling in a family of medicines called the beta blockers. These medicines are known to kill libido. Other than loss of desire, Gabriel also reported weak erections and sometimes total loss of erections, all known to be side effects of the beta blockers.

This couple’s experience is an important lesson for anyone being put on treatment for any disease. Please note that there are many medicines that affect sex drive. Medicines can cause lack of desire as well as erectile dysfunction in men and vaginal dryness and pain during sex in women.

And do not think that it is the complicated medicines that lead to these problems; it is actually the many medicines we use for common health conditions. Some oral contraceptive pills, for example, fall into this category. A number of medicines used for allergy as well as pain killers have also been implicated. Make it a point to always enquire about the sexual side effects of medicines before you start taking them. The good thing is that there are always alternative medicines you can use.

Back to Rose’s and Gabriel’s case, medicines for their health conditions were changed to those that have no effect on libido. It would take another three months before improvement was realised as the drugs cleared out of the body. As always, the sexology clinic used this period to offer  sex coaching so that the couple could rekindle their intimacy.