The Joy of Researching the Health Benefits of Sex

By MELINDA BECK
WSJ

Is sex good for your health—or is that just a fantasy?

A flurry of small studies suggest that sex is as good for your health as vitamin D and broccoli. It not only relieves stress, improves sleep and burns calories, it can also reduce pain, ease depression, strengthen blood vessels, boost the immune system and lower the risk of prostate and breast cancer.

But many of those studies rely on people to remember and report their sexual activity honestly and many can't distinguish between cause and effect. That is, does sex make people healthier or do healthier people have more sex?

More research is needed to evaluate all these claims. "If I told you we have randomized double-blind placebo-controlled multi-center trials on these questions, there is no such a thing," says Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and editor in chief of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. The biggest obstacle is lack of funding, he says. "If 'sex' is in your grant proposal, it's very hard to get it approved."

(Original here.)