Prescription: Sex
A man walks into his doctor's office complaining that he can't sleep and keeps having these moments where his brain just goes blank. The doctor runs the usual checks and finds nothing out of order. He pauses, tips his head to one side, thinks for a minute, then asks the patient about his sex life. The man blinks, a little thrown by the question, and answers that it's pretty good for a guy who's been married two decades. About four times a year, he says. His birthday, Valentine's Day, the anniversary, and Father's Day. The doctor nods, scribbles something on his prescription pad, hands it over, and wishes him well. The man gets home, and he and his wife read what the doctor wrote: sex at least twice a week.
You're probably smiling at that, and fair enough. But there's a real point buried in the setup. For men especially, sex isn't a trivial thing. It does something for the body.
Sex still makes people squirm as a topic. Grown adults change the subject when it comes up. Most of what gets written about it by psychologists and relationship therapists is aimed at helping couples connect or reignite things in the bedroom. What gets less attention is the straightforward physical side of it. More doctors are now putting out solid information on what sex actually does for your health, and some of that data points to it mattering more for men than for women. There's a slow effort underway to let the subject be discussed openly rather than treated as something shameful. Strange to think of it this way, but sex functions as a kind of free medicine that can cut your odds of trouble down the road. Don't be shocked if the man in your life comes looking for more of it once he's read any of this.
Take the heart. Heart disease and high blood pressure hit millions of people in this country, and research points to men in their 40s and 50s being more vulnerable to both than women of the same age. When the arteries and veins feeding the heart and the rest of the body start to narrow, blood doesn't move the way it should, and the organs that depend on it suffer. That same restriction drags down testosterone, which is one of the roads to erectile dysfunction. The standard answer from a doctor is medication plus changes to how you live. Sex belongs on that list too. Studies find it pushes blood through the body more freely, and physicians have suggested two or three times a week as a reasonable target for keeping testosterone up and the cardiovascular system moving. The act also triggers hormones that play a part in regulating blood pressure (Iliades, 2012).
There's a cognitive angle as well. The brain runs most of what the body does, from smell and touch to how we behave, and it's also where desire lives. Scott Kaufman looked into the connection between sex and thinking in his piece Love, Lust, and Creative Thinking, and his conclusion was that lust seems to sharpen both analytical ability and creative problem-solving (Kaufman, 2009).
Then there's the prostate. Prostate cancer tends to surface in men around their mid-50s, and like a lot of conditions it ties back to family history, ethnicity, and age. David Samadi, writing in The Link Between Sex and Prostate Cancer, argues that an active sex life in your twenties lowers the odds of running into the disease later on. He cites a figure: men who had twenty or more partners in their twenties showed a 19% drop in risk. The practical takeaway he lands on is frequent ejaculation, again roughly two or three times a week (Samadi, 2014). So the next time you spot an older man with a younger woman, maybe hold the judgment. He might just be buying himself time. And don't be grossed out if it turns out your own parents still have a sex life. It's how you showed up here in the first place.
The West still treats the whole subject as off-limits, and plenty of people have it filed away as something meant only for making babies or chasing pleasure. Researchers and therapists would do well to spend more time on the medical side of it. Sex can take the edge off stress and make a relationship better, sure. It can also, in a real and measurable way, keep you healthier. Talk to your own doctor before you get active, and practice safe sex. - Heather Browning, MBA, BA
References: Iliades, Chris (31 January 2012). Alternative Medicine. Retrieved March 15, 2015. Kaufman, Scott B. (10 September 2009). Love, Lust, and Creativity. Psychology Today. Retrieved March 15, 2015. Samadi, D. (21 November 2014). The Link Between Sex and Prostate Cancer. Retrieved March 15, 2015.