Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Definition
By Mayo Clinic staffPainful intercourse can be difficult to talk about. If you're experiencing painful intercourse, you may wonder if the pain is all in your head or the result of something you're doing wrong in bed. After all, sex is supposed to be pleasurable, right?
The truth is that sex isn't pleasurable or pain-free for all women all the time. In fact, many women experience painful intercourse at some point in their lives, for a variety of very normal reasons. The medical term for painful intercourse is dyspareunia (dis-puh-ROO-ne-uh) — which is defined as persistent or recurrent genital pain that occurs just before, during or after intercourse and that causes you personal distress. And painful intercourse is worth talking about, because there are treatments that can help eliminate or reduce this common problem.
- MacNeill C. Dyspareunia. Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinics of North America. 2006;33:565.
- Stewart EG. Approach to the woman with a sexual pain disorder. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Nov. 3, 2009.
- Stewart EG. Causes and treatment of sexual pain disorders. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Nov. 3, 2009.
- Steege JF, et al. Evaluation and treatment of dyspareunia. Obstetrics & Gynecology. 2009;113:1124.
- Ryan L, et al. 10-minute consultation: Female dyspareunia. British Medical Journal. 2004; 328:1357.
- Heim LJ. Evaluation and differential diagnosis of dyspareunia. American Family Physician. 2001;63:1535.
- Chasson S. Female sexual dysfunction. In: Schuiling KD, et al. Women's Gynecologic Health. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett; 2006:343.
- Birnbaum SL. Medical evaluation of female sexual dysfunction. In: Goroll AH, et al. Primary Care Medicine. 5th ed. Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2008. http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&NEWS=N&PAGE=booktext&D=books&AN=00140049/5th_Edition/115&XPATH=/OVIDBOOK%5b1%5d/METADATA%5b1%5d/TBY%5b1%5d/EDITORS%5b1%5d. Accessed Nov. 11, 2009.
- Latthe P, et al. WHO systematic review of prevalence of chronic pelvic pain: A neglected reproductive health morbidity. BioMed Central Public Health. 2006;6:177. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/177. Accessed Nov. 10, 2009.
- Swanson JB (expert opinion). Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Nov. 19, 2009.
