“National Survey Reveals Lower Back Pain Sufferers Would Give up Sex to Live Without Pain”

This was the headline of a press release that showed up in my inbox today. And excited as I was to find someone writing about sex and pain I was just as quickly annoyed by the contents of the press release which are not only completely meaningless (as they are reported out of the situation-specific framework they were asked in) but which seem to trivialize the experience they mean to highlight. Where to begin?

For starters, the “national survey” included a grand total of 445 men and women, and was conducted by a telephone survey company which is “designed to meet the standards of quality associated with custom research studies.” We’re only left to wonder what those standards of quality are, and what is meant by “custom research studies”.

But much more than the methodological problems, it is the contents of the survey that are most troubling. The result that the headline refers to was that 56 percent of the people surveyed would give up sex for six months if it meant a break from the pain. You may be wondering, what else chronic pain sufferers would do to avoid pain. Here’s a sampling:

• 65 percent were willing to give up dessert for a year
• 54 percent would undergo root canal if it meant no more back pain
• 41 percent would give birth
• 37 percent would skydive out of a plane

So what they’ve done here is to ask people who are living with “severe back pain” what hypothetical things they are willing to give up to magically make the pain disappear. This is problematic in so many ways.

The exercise is not completely unlike asking a starving person what they’d give up for a bit of food. People who are starving deserve the food they need to survive. Offering someone who is malnourished a lottery ticket, and a pat on the emaciated back for good luck isn’t helpful, it’s cruel. Similarly, people living with chronic pain deserve creative solutions and support that can help them experience a healthy sexuality on their own terms, not play fantasy games of what they’d give up to be like “normal” people (wherein “normal” people are the ones who never experience pain, a group as imaginary as the skydiving going on in this survey).

When you live with chronic pain it can effect every part of your life; how you think, how you feel, certainly how you move around, your desires, expectations…everything. In this context to give me the choice of not feeling pain, or, say, diving out of an airplane seems taunting.

The nature of the survey also reveals a surprising ignorance of the nature of chronic pain on the part of two organizations (the survey was developed “in partnership” between a for-profit company and a not-for-profit physicians association) who should know better. Chronic pain is not a disease that can be cured with a pill (even though in some cases pain may be caused by a disease) and it shouldn’t be framed as an experience that, if you’re lucky enough, or willing to sacrifice enough, can be made to simply disappear.

I have no doubt that this tiny survey was conducted with the best of intentions (those intentions of course included getting media coverage for the company that paid for the survey). And the bottom line for me is that any public discussion of sex and chronic pain is a good opportunity to talk more about a subject that is greatly under discussed. And as usual, sex was simply a hook to get people to read the press release. I only wish that both the company, and the physician society that is affiliated with the company, made better use of their time and money by raising the level of discussion, not lowering it.

Related: Ways to reduce pain during sex ; Reasons why sex may be painful ; Back pain overview ; More from your About guide to Back Pain