Simply put, sex is one sensitive topic and not just to troubled teenage boys. Even here at the brink of the millennium, sex packs a punch powerful enough to stagger the whole country. Think gay rights. Think Bill and Monica. There are all sorts of meanings that people put on their sexual lives, points out Julia Strand, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and assistant director of the unit.
Sex is different.
And so, therefore, is the medicine of sex in ways that apply to institutions as well as individuals. There isn t any sex at Hopkins anymore. And yet, Hopkins operates one of the nation s oldest and most respected sexual behaviors clinics, with a reputation for outstanding research and clinical expertise. Its therapists hold faculty status, and medical students and psychiatry residents rotating through the unit are put through educational regimens in the medicine of sex that may be the most extensive offered by any academic medical center. The unit s patients fall roughly into two categories.