Advocating For a Transdisciplinary Perspective in Sexual Medicine
Michael A. Perelman
Current Sexual Health Reports ISSN 1548-3584 Curr Sex Health Rep DOI 10.1007/s11930-015-0040-3
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Author's personal copy Curr Sex Health Rep DOI 10.1007/s11930-015-0040-3
INVITED COMMENTARY
Advocating For a Transdisciplinary Perspective in Sexual Medicine Michael A. Perelman
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2015
Abstract Editor-in-Chief commentary on the 2014 re-launch of Current Sexual Health Reports.
Commentary The first year of the re-launched Current Sexual Health Reports was successfully completed with 30 articles being carefully reviewed and shepherded to publication by our editorial board and section editors. They are deserving of our thanks and appreciation for their hard work, and we offer special thanks to our authors for their fine contributions. As we enter 2015, I also want to share a bit of personal history, and more importantly, a vision for this journal and the field of sexual medicine. In 1974, I returned to Columbia University from a year as Chief Intern in Medical Psychology specializing “psychophysiological disorders” at Duke. Back in NYC, I simultaneously began working with Helen Kaplan at Cornell and Ray Rosen who both served as my independent sex therapy dissertation advisors. By the new millennium, I had progressed from an earnest young sex therapist to an experienced advocate for a “combination treatment,” approach to sexual disorders and concerns [1–5]. That perspective was influenced by our multidisciplinary work at Cornell but more significantly by my experience serving on numerous
M. A. Perelman Psychiatry, Reproductive Medicine and Urology, NY Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, USA M. A. Perelman (*) 70 East 77th Street, Suite 1C, New York, NY 10075, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
pharmaceutical advisory boards with colleagues from other professions of origin. Industry development programs all followed similar processes, which always included an array of consultants who presented their own specialties to each other, including urology, endocrinology, cardiology, gynecology, psychology, sociology, geriatrics, genetics, philosophy, statistics, research methodology, cultural anthropology, law, etc. The benefit to industry was economic, yet the consequence to many of us was a greatly enhanced multidisciplinary perspective. My multidisciplinary viewpoint has gradually morphed into a transdisciplinary one, and I now advocate for greater integration of knowledge and practice, not merely combining the efforts of different practitioners [6, 7]. For sexual medicine to truly advance as a discipline (art and science), its specialized practitioners must not only draw from their own discipline’s knowledge base but must also transcend the biases of their profession of origin in order to best address a common problem. Some have already made such a transition. These are the individuals who have integrated knowledge of other academic and clinical traditions while cultivating an ever-refined perspective on sexuality’s mind/body conundrum. While the majority of health-care professionals pay lip service to a biopsychosocial-cultural model, many still maintain a view that is too narrowly shaped by their own professional training. Yet, evidence from laboratories (including fMRI studies) around the world supporting a mind/body integration becomes more abundant with each year that passes [8–10]. For example, a very recent fMRI study demonstrated how neurons in the prefrontal cortex contribute to cognitive and emotional processes and in doing so may both enhance and disrupt sexual desire and function [7]. Such processes are predicted by the Sexual Tipping Point® model and other dual control biopsychosocial-cultural models [11–14]. A true understanding of the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of sexual disorders and concerns will require the development of a
Author's personal copy Curr Sex Health Rep
transdisciplinary profession, where there is greater recognition that our patients present with problems that cross the boundaries of multiple disciplines [15]. Such a transdisciplinary model reflects a pedagogical evolution that has already influenced several other disciplines such as cancer and obesity research [16]. Hopefully, as that enlightened viewpoint becomes more prevalent, it will become the model taught to all health-care practitioners early in their training. It is my wish for 2015 that this online journal with its multiple sections written and edited by professionals from diverse backgrounds will provide a platform for the dissemination of reviews, which will iteratively add to such a transdisciplinary outlook. Compliance with Ethics Guidelines Conflict of Interest Michael A. Perelman declares no conflict of interest. Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by the author.
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