Medscape Coverage of the Penis and Clitoris

Jessica Pin
4 min readAug 12, 2020

On Medscape, 57 times as many words cover the penis as cover the clitoris.

If you are thinking there just isn’t much to cover about the clitoris, think again. Nearly everything covered about the penis can and should also be covered for the clitoris. In fact, there is a whole textbook on it (which gets ignored).

Ignorance of clitoral anatomy among physicans leads to real patient harm. I, along with many other women, have been harmed due to this gross systemic negligence.

Word count comparisons include all coverage in anatomy articles and articles on sexual function and dysfunction.

Clitoris

Word count: 77.

Clitoral anatomy is only covered one anatomy article on Medscape: “Female Reproductive Organ Anatomy.”

Note there is no discussion of clitoral anatomy and physiology in the Medscape article “Female Sexual Dysfunction.” In fact, no anatomy is covered at all!

This is the entirety of coverage of clitoral anatomy. It is incorrect.
No detail for the clitoris is shown. In the second figure, the clitoral body is minimized and not at all to scale.

Penis

Word count: 4,834.

Note I left coverage of the male urethra out of the screen shots and word count, though it is in the penis.

Penile anatomy is covered in 3 anatomy articles on Medscape: “Penis Anatomy,” “Male Urinary Organ Anatomy,” and “Male Reproductive Organ Anatomy.”

Penile anatomy is covered again in the article on “Erectile Dysfunction.”

It is notable that the clitoris is omitted from the sagittal view for the female.
Note that the clitoris has erectile mechanisms, which are ignored.

--

--

Jessica Pin

Getting clitoral neural anatomy included in OB/GYN textbooks. It was finally added for the first time in July 2019. BME/EE @WUSTL