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Words Matter: Putting An End To “Unsafe” And “Risky” Sex, Julia L. Marcus, Jonathan Snowden

OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Change is constant in sexual health, as in health care more broadly. Novel pathogens are identified, epidemics emerge and reemerge, and new preventive and therapeutic agents are introduced and taken up by populations. On the other hand, some care strategies and practices fall by the wayside among clinicians and populations. Just as health and health care evolve, so too should the language that we use to describe them.

In this commentary, we express our concerns about the use of ambiguous and stigmatizing language when describing sexual behavior. A search on PubMed in September 2019 yielded over four thousand articles with …