Women's sexual health: Why it matters, what can go wrong, and how to fix it | Sharon Parish, M.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you wanna take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you wanna learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Dr. Sharon Parish. Sharon is a prominent sexual medicine specialist and professor of medicine in clinical psychiatry and clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Throughout her career, she has become a leading expert in sexual medicine, focusing her work on helping patients overcome sexual dysfunction. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on sexual health and is a sought after speaker and educator on the topic.
In this episode, we focus the entire conversation around women's sexual health. So for folks who are curious about men's sexual health, not to worry, next week we'll be launching the complimentary podcast to this that focuses exclusively on men's sexual health.
In this episode, we review the female physiology and anatomy in order to better understand some of the potential problems and treatments available to women that we cover throughout the interview. We speak about how sexual health and sexual dysfunction can affect a woman's wellbeing and how childbirth and metabolic health can affect women's sexual health. From there, we cover a variety of issues a woman may face throughout her life by looking at three different case studies.
Using these case studies, we differentiate and tease apart the differences between desire and arousal. We talk about different classes of drugs that are available for women as it relates to desire and arousal. We talk about the impact of birth control. We talk about treatments for women who are having difficulty achieving orgasm, including testosterone and DHEA. And we of course talk about the role of hormone replacement in addition to many other things.
One final point, I learn something with every podcast I do. In other words, every time I finish interviewing somebody, regardless of how well I know the subject matter beforehand, I always come away learning something. But it might be the case that this episode in particular taught me more that I didn't know relative to any other podcast I can recall. So I think it's safe to say that whether you're a man or a woman, you will learn a lot from this episode that will improve the quality of your life. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Sharon Parish.
Hey Sharon, thank you so much for making time to meet with me today. This is a topic that is incredibly applicable to more than half our population because while we're gonna be talking about sexual function in women, of course women have partners. And so by extension, I would argue this is a topic that is applicable to our entire listening population. It's also a topic where there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of asymmetry in attention. We're gonna talk about a bunch of those things as we get going. Before we do though, I just kind of wanna give people a sense of your background and how you arrived where you did. So you went to medical school, you did your residency in internal medicine and primary care, correct?

**Sharon Parish** (3:41)
That is right. And primary care, meaning with a focus on ambulatory medicine and being sort of a general medical physician with a focus on primary care and academic general medicine.

**Peter Attia** (3:52)
But what point during that process did you realize that your interest was in sexual health?

**Sharon Parish** (3:58)
I think when I was in med school, really, I was always struggling. It seems like a little bit of a strange union, but always struggling between deciding whether I wanted to be a general internist, a psychiatrist or a gynecologist. This interface, particularly, although I do, as an internist, I do take care of men's sexual health as well, this interface between women's health, the mind and the body, behavioral issues, and comprehensive or for lack of a better word, holistic care for all sort of was always tugging at me in three different directions. And somehow when I eventually found my way to sexual medicine, it just kind of brought it all together.