Secret Suffering

How Women's Sexual and Pelvic Pain Affects Their Relationships

Susan Bilheimer, Robert J. Echenberg M.D.

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780313359217
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313359224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

Through classic, new, and emerging research, with statements from experts and interviews with Chronic Pelvic Pain (CPP) sufferers and their partners and spouses, Secret Suffering: How Women's Sexual and Pelvic Pain Affects Their Relationships exposes and gives strong voice and compassionate understanding to this complex disorder.

Secret Suffering: How Women's Sexual and Pelvic Pain Affects Their Relationships is the first book to explain how pelvic and sexual pain affects the lives of women (and men) and their partners in their own words/ The work also provides information on cutting-edge research and describes the most effective treatment modalities. Susan Bilheimer, coauthor, shares her own experiences as a patient who has gone down the painful, frustrating road of living with an illness that is often dismissed and not taken seriously. Robert J. Echenberg, M.D., coauthor, has treated over 700 women (and some men) with the disorder. He shares his decades of experience and expertise as a gynecologist and specialist in the treatment of chronic pelvic pain.

Not only does CPP interfere with a woman's physical and mental health, it can wreak havoc in family relationships, ruin careers, and wreck marriages. In the majority of cases, women suffer in silence. Even when they do seek medical help, what they find too often is inadequate care, as most doctors, even gynecological specialists, are not properly trained in recognizing, much less treating, all aspects of CPP.

Through classic, new, and emerging research, with statements from experts and interviews with CPP sufferers and their partners, Secret Suffering exposes and gives strong voice and compassionate understanding to this complex disorder. Most importantly, information on effective treatments for CPP, as well as the depression and other psychological fallout it may cause, are presented. Through Secret Suffering, Bilheimer and Echenberg finally shatter the silence, educate patients, build understanding, and demand that chronic pelvic and genital pain be taken seriously by the medical community.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword: What Do I Know?
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why This Book Had to Be Written
• 2. The Many Faces of Sexual Pain
• 3. Christin Veasley: Personal Pain and Professional Passion
• 4. Understanding Chronic Pain and Your Nervous System
• 5. Sexual Pain and Our Most Intimate Relationships
• 6. Bill: Sexual Pain from a Husband’s Point of View
• 7. Jennifer and Lisa: A Same-Sex Couple’s Struggle with Sexual Pain
• 8. The Dilemma of Single Women with Chronic Pelvic Pain
• 9. Our Relationships outside the Bedroom
• 10. Listening to Our Daughters
• 11. Lori: A Young Woman of Faith
• 12. A Tale of Two Men Who Experience Sexual Pain
• 13. Our Relationship with the Medical Community: The Dark Side
• 14. Into the Light: The New Paradigm of Chronic Sexual and Pelvic Pain Treatment
• 15. A Discussion of Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy
• 16. Amy: The High Value of Intimacy for a Cancer Survivor
• Series Editor Afterword
• Appendix A: Sixty-four Tips to Relieve Sexual and Pelvic Pain
• Appendix B: Pelvic Pain and Urgency/Frequency Patient Symptom Scale (PUF) and Vulvar Pain Questionnaires
• Appendix C: About the Internet Survey Conducted for Secret Suffering
• Appendix D: About the Experts Interviewed for Secret Suffering
• Appendix E: Running a Pelvic Pain Management Program
• Appendix F: An International Plea
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index