Since addiction is not a fruit, and can be bad for you, knowing the difference is crucial for a medical practitioner in deciding effective treatment outcomes, especially in a country like India, where
a vast majority of doctors are incompetent in treating sexual difficulties.

The difference between addiction and compulsive behaviour is a nuance that matters to people in distress. This is because the usual treatment line for addiction, engaged in by doctors, who can also act as gate keepers of morality on behalf of their church and culture, are not going to work for people labelled as “porn addicts” other than instilling them with a greater sense of shame and unworthiness.

I know this personally, because, several years ago, while going through a sexual difficulty of my own, I too was sold into this myth of porn addiction by some “qualified quacks” who told me how it can lead to erectile dysfunction, only to self-discover, years later, after a traumatic break-up, that my difficulty had nothing to do with porn, but a dysfunctional masturbatory technique, which around 10 per cent of men in the world inadvertently learn, due to religious and cultural repression around sex, but can be corrected, easily, with the right medical advice.

So when a medical practitioner ignores this danger, and invents his/her own definition of addiction, they are automatically infusing subjective moralisms, biases and prejudices into the treatment, which can be useless or even detrimental to a patient. It’s almost similar to how some doctors still continue to peddle gay cure therapy, despite WHO and other medicals bodies declaring homosexuality as a normal variation of human sexuality. These are medical professionals who believe in anecdotes and scriptures, not science.

To know more, I asked VVox experts Dr D Narayana Reddy, a globally acclaimed sexual health specialist and a Vvox expert.

Dr D Narayana Reddy: Porn/sex addiction is a term that’s popularised by the media.

Labelling, stigmatising people as addicts without understanding its impact is not scientific. As a doctor, it’s important to know the underlying issues behind people who diagnose themselves/are labelled as porn/sex addicts and why they act out/behave in a certain way.