European Sexual Awareness Events (ESAE)

ESDA participation in Brasov conference Romania

Profesor Stamatis Papaharitou attends a conference in Romania on behalf of the European Sexual Health Alliance (HSHA).

The AMSR Conference was held in Brasov 6-8 April, 2008 in Brasov. Dr Calomfirescu kindly invited HSHA to participate and give an overview of our work in order to encourage other neighbouring countries to engage in activities aimed at increasing awareness of sexual dysfunction. Dr Calomfirescu presented the work that is being done in Romania aimed at patients. They are encouraged to send their questions via a website where experts answer queries regarding sex health issues. Professor Papaharitous presented HSHA's objectives, comparative data from different European countries as had been presented at the last ESSM meeting in Lisbon and the experience of the Greek centre, how the centre and the helpline were set up, how the staff is trained, local data and of course all the activities carried out by the Greek HSHA office, these include: workshops for pharmacists, GPs and other health professions, meetings and lobbying with patients organizations, the annual festival, clinical trials, basic research and community studies.

Dr Calomfirescu has been very active in encouraging Romania to join in HSHA activities and has adapted HSHA literature to the local language so that visitors to the Web site can get access to leaflets dealing with the most common sexual health issues for men and women.

Introducing a new affiliated society : Hungarian Society for Sexual Medicine

Before the end of the XIX century in Hungary -similarly to other countries in Europe- sexuality was observed by medical professionals mainly as part of reproduction and an origin of STD.

After the well known and popular work of Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud , psychiatrists changed the attitude of the society and dominated over the field of sexuality for about one hundred years. However Ferenczi and Balint , the most famous Hungarian psychoanalysts did not pay so much attention to sexuality as their mentor , Freud.

In the same period the urologists’ interest over the sexuality in our country was limited to the treatment of STD and anatomical deformities of genitals. ED was observed in that time as a predominantly psychological problem. In 1925 a book named „ Vita Sexualis” was published in Budapest. It is a very interesting fact that in this book forty-one different aphrodisiacs were recited as available in pharmacies that time. One of them , the „Yohistrin Masculinum ” ,which was a mixture of Yohimbin and Testosteron was on the market for more than fifty years and even I used it for the treatment of ED in the early eighties.

This approach to sexual problems was characteristic until the second part of the eighties in our country when self injection with Papaverine was introduced into the practice .The technique was invented by Ronald Virag who lives in Paris but has Hungarian origin. It was not only the first effective treatment of ED in the hands of urologists, but the success of the self injections focused the interest of some urologists to ED treatment and it was the first step of the future progress.

Having learnt the penile prosthesis surgery technique from a video , Alexander Török- who is a board member in our new society - developed a Hungarian semi rigid prosthesis in 1988 and also started venous surgery for impotence in our country . In 1991 Steven Willson, the famous expert visited Hungary to promote inflatable prosthesis implantation . Dr Török and me learned the technique of penoscrotal insertion from him and we have successfully implanted more than two thousands of implants during the past twenty years. ¬During this period we established „Hungarian Potency Foundation ” to promote ED treatment in our country and we organized a sexual medicine meeting in Cyprus with international participation in 1993 . In the same year two outpatient clinics were opened to treat male sexual problems.

In the field of female sexual dysfunction the psychological approach dominated and there were no such a rapid changes like in ED treatment during this period. Only in the past few years some medical activity started after participation of FSD interested physicians in new pharmaceutical studies on FSD and in the School of Sexual Medicine . Some of us believe that we shall acquire more knowledge about physiology of FSD and some more progress can be made consequently in the treatment of FSD similarly to that we saw in ED treatment.

At the moment we have all possibilities to treat sexual problems in Hungary , but there was a tremendous need to coordinate the collaboration among different specialists , improve our activity in research and publication. That is why some specialists in our country decided to establish the Hungarian Society for Sexual Medicine / HSSM / last year. The number of Hungarian ESSM members has been more than tripled during the last month and we have five active participants at the School of Sexual Medicine .Our society is open for everybody and we have gynaecologists , psychiatrists, sexual-psychologists, urologists ,plastic surgeons ,oncologists and GP-s among our members. We do not plan to have expensive meetings but our most important task is to organize trainings in sexual medicine , involving GP-s into the sexual medicine treatment , coordination of studies etc. Our members are enthusiastic about HSSM , our new society will be able to promote the development of sexual medicine in our country.
You can find more information about us at our website www.sexualmedicine.hu

Ferenc Fekete
HSSM president