Epidemiologically speaking, having your doctor write a prescription for your lover may be preferable to sending a love letter. It is now legal in 27 states for a physician to write a prescription for a patient s unnamed sexual partner when the patient himself has been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease (STD). The practice is called expedited partner therapy (EPT), and it s proving to be an effective means of reducing the rates of sexually transmitted diseases that can be treated with antibiotics.
In a trial of nearly 1,000 men infected with either gonorrhea or chlamydia, only 14 percent of those using EPT had a persistent or recurrent infection, compared with 43 percent of men who were simply referred to a doctor by the original patient. While the efficacy of the method was not as significant in women, in whom re-infection rates were already much lower, improvement was still noticeable: 15 percent in the referral group, as opposed to 12 percent in the EPT group, were re-infected in a trial of nearly 2,000 women.
While the new practice is far from ideal, physicians recognize that it should not be dismissed at least not while the spread of many STDs in the U.S. is reaching record highs. ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross agrees: Reducing the spread of STDs is a highly worthwhile goal, he says. Yet treating someone with whom you don t have a doctor-patient relationship is fraught with medical, legal, and ethical complications. University of Pennsylvania bio-ethicist Arthur Caplan says that this is an instance in which patient education becomes very important; patients who receive prescriptions for their partners will need to educate them in turn. It s likely that such a situation will become increasingly common, as most medical professionals acknowledge that the risks of EPT are well worth enduring if the practice effectively lowers the rate of STDs across the U.S.
