Have You Heard of Dyspareunia?

Dyspareunia causes an agonising pain in the area of the vagina and vulva during sexual intercourse.

 

Dyspareunia causes problems, but they can be resolved. (jlp)

In dyspareunia, everything is painful. You can already feel pain during foreplay, in fondling and stimulating the genitals, during intercourse as well as afterwards. An orgasm is also painful. The term dyspareunia isn’t the most appropriate so the problems described by this term are normally called “coitalgy”, similar to what men experience. There are organic or psychological causes of dyspareunia, but these causes can also be intertwined, or organic causes trigger psychological causes and thus the problems last even after the basic problem has been resolved. In that case, a woman is simply afraid of new pain during coitus.

 

What are organic factors?

 

Among organic causes of dyspareunia, abnormalities of the genitals are rare, but various acute and chronic infections, infections of the vagina and urethra, malign formations, diseases of bladder, kidney and ovarian diseases and sexual diseases are more common. Today, young women have various painful infections of the outer and inner lips because of nylon panties under tightly fitted jeans trousers or excessive use of sprays for intimate parts. In menopause and afterwards, you can feel pain because you lack hormones or have insufficient lubrication of the vagina. Pain, which is usually transitional, sometimes also appears during delivery, after various gynaecological operations and examinations, as well as after losing virginity and during the first sexual intercourse. According to the majority of authors, organic causes of dyspareunia are frequent and appear in somewhat 10% of cases.

It’s a known fact that tight clothes affect the processes in the body despite being a decorative accessory. (jlp)

Psychological causes

There are also a number of psychological causes of dyspareunia. The first is dyspareunia in neurotic, immature and inexperienced women with a subconscious or completely imaginary fear of pain. Other causes are the feelings of guilt, shame and discomfort, fear of getting pregnant, fear of being caught (if partners have sex in inappropriate circumstances), fear of injuring the foetus (during pregnancy) and so on.

The common causes are bickering between the partners, poor foreplay because of which the vagina isn’t wet enough, impatience and brutality in coitus or a wrong position (pain appears more often if a woman is on top because the penis can penetrate deeper inside, to the cervix). In any case, careful anamnesis is important since it determines how the condition is treated. The scheme of anamnesis for dyspareunia was proposed by Abarbanel, who also provided an overview of all possible organic causes.

 

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