Dr. Diggs Makes Guest Appearance On Dr. Laura Show

Only One ‘Safe-Sex’ Method is 100% Effective

By Ed Oliver
December 2001

John Diggs, M.D.

Dr. John Diggs, a resident of South Hadley and an expert in sexual health, was a guest on the Dr. Laura show last month. A medical doctor, Dr. Diggs took questions from callers for an hour and used the opportunity to promote abstinence-until-marriage as the only "safe sex" method that is one hundred percent effective.

Leading off the show, Dr. Laura asked Diggs why the American Medical Association has no problem telling children, "Don’t be violent, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t drink alcohol, don’t drive without a seatbelt -- but if you are going to have sex, do it this way."

Dr. Laura said she could not understand why such smart people in the AMA would give children and the American people such wrong advice on how to avoid sexual diseases.

Diggs said it is important to recognize that the AMA is a lobbying organization, "and just like any other lobbying organization, occasionally some small group can take over and mandate what the policy is of a very large organization."

A reason why smart people support a bad message, according to Diggs, is because even though it is an intellectual issue, at some level it is a spiritual issue. He said the natural drive for sex has been augmented by visual media images. What some people call sin "looks good," he said.

"So what happens with smart people, they say, ‘Gee, this looks good. Yeah we know there’s problems, the unwanted pregnancies, the STD’s, etc., but there must be a way around it."

Diggs said the person that turned things all around was Dr. Albert Kinsey, a zoologist who wrote about sexual behavior back in the forties and fifties. Kinsey claimed to have discovered a scientific doctrine that people were sexual from birth. A powerful media campaign supporting that position led to a more liberal attitude about sex.

Diggs said some people think there is a crisis of teenage pregnancy today that requires desperate measures, but he said there is no crisis. "The highest rate of teenage pregnancy was actually the 1950’s," he said, but added that there was no social upheaval then because they got married, unlike today, where the government replaces the father.

Should Schools Teach Abstinence?

A caller said he wants the schools to teach abstinence, but they prefer a sex-ed menu approach. He asked Diggs how to teach a spiritual concept in a non-spiritual world.

Diggs said that first of all, every person on the planet is a spiritual person. He said the charge has been made that somehow teaching abstinence until marriage is a religious message. "But the fact of the matter is, marriage has been supported in every single culture around the globe ever since there has been recorded history of people. You can’t very well claim that something is a religious message if everybody in the world has backed it at some point in time."

Diggs said secondly that it could be approached with the issue of medical accuracy. He said the National Institute of Health released a report in July that reviewed more than a decade of studies evaluating condom effectiveness in preventing the spread of eight sexually transmitted diseases. There is no convincing scientific evidence that condoms stop 6.5 of the eight diseases evaluated, he said. "I think it is irresponsible for any medical organization to recommend this to children."

A nurse who was seeking a master’s degree said the dean of her school told her she could not do her thesis on teaching abstinence to teenagers because it was "hiding my head in the sand."

She wanted advice on the best way to handle it because she felt strongly about it and did not want to give up easily.

Diggs suggested that if she could not write about abstinence, another approach would be to look at the public health data and write about the failure of the safe-sex message. He said we’ve been teaching safe-sex for twenty or thirty years now. "Safe-sex is actually a term coined with the advent of the AIDS epidemic. They were trying to find a way for people who had HIV to continue to have sex, and it was generally morphed into the approach for adolescents.

One thing to do is just look at the failure there, and all you have to do is track the STD rates over time."

Playing ‘Russian Roulette’

In response to a question about the AIDS virus and condoms, Diggs said the NIH report shows that we as a culture, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in particular, have been saying condoms are effective when they have been shown not to be to any significant degree.

Diggs said even though condoms are supposed to be responsible for an 85 percent reduction in HIV, as a physician he has to go back to his primary medical ethic which is, "First, do no harm."

"If I’m recommending something that I know has a fifteen- percent failure rate, I have to take some responsibility for that. That fifteen- percent failure rate does not represent people you can treat and cure. That represents people who are going to die."

Diggs reiterated that people are trying to find their way around the age-old prohibition against sex outside of marriage. "That’s not strictly a religious message by any stretch of the imagination," he said.

A caller asked if condoms aren’t better than nothing. Diggs said, "The bottom line is that if condoms don’t provide protection they claim for sexually transmitted disease, I don’t think that you want teenagers relying on them, because they’re not just trying to stop pregnancy, but also STD’s."

Diggs said beyond those issues, most people want to get married and have a successful life. Getting involved with pre-marital sex, he said, decreases the chance of a successful marriage whether or not you get pregnant or an STD.

Diggs said people argue that we need to teach safe-sex because people supposedly can’t control themselves. "Well if it’s true that you can’t control yourself, why do you expect you can control yourself by using condoms, or control yourself if you do get married. Why should you stop at your spouse [if you want sex]?"

What’s It Like in Massachusetts?

A caller wondered if Diggs was catching flak at home in Massachusetts seeing he lives in such a liberal area.

Diggs said he has built a solid medical reputation over the years locally, but he is starting to get some attention from the national groups. "That is because one of the things I do is use their own data to show their position is flawed. I don’t go out and find something from some study buried in a third-rate journal, I come with the topnotch stuff straight out of the AMA, New England Journal, CDC. I just show that their approach has failed and will continue to fail."

In response to a question about doctors examining and treating minor children for sexual matters without the parent’s knowledge, Diggs said unfortunately somehow it is legal, even though he completely disagrees with it and thinks it is unethical. He said without their parents’ influence, a fifteen-year-old is somehow expected to make decisions which can have life-long consequences.

Dr. Diggs is a resident of South Hadley. He has appeared on national television programs and is co-chair of the Massachusetts Physicians Resource Council and an Executive Committee member of the nationwide Physicians Consortium. As a physician, Diggs has 16 years of clinical experience in caring for ethnically and socio-economically diverse patients in communities from New England to California.