Talking About Sex to Oncologists and Cancer to Sexologists

When I moved from Italy to the Netherlands in the early 1990s, I had just graduated from medical school and was looking for a job. I was offered a residency in urology at the University Hospital Rotterdam (now Erasmus Medical Center) and was asked whether I was interested in developing a research program for sexual dysfunction after radical prostatectomy. Tough topic! Unaware of the available knowledge at that time, I soon realized that limited studies had been published on the issue and that these were often of poor scientific quality, biased and most were retrospective. I got so involved in sexual functioning after surgery that I decided to attend an international meeting on sexuality. Attending the meeting of the International Society of Impotence Research, now the International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM) in Singapore in 1992 convinced me to become a sexual medicine specialist. I continued with a residency in oncology and expanded the sexual research program to all cancer patients, not just those who had prostate cancer surgery. A lot has changed since then. Most of my fellow oncologists (and urologists as well) were very skeptical and did not really think that the “Italian doctor” would do much better than they did in dealing with sexual issues.