Consultant Physician in Genito-Urinary Medicine, Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Trust, Chester.

(United Kingdom)

Colm O’Mahony MD., FRCP., BSc., Dip.Ven. is a Consultant in Genito-Urinary Medicine at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Trust. He deals with sexually transmitted infections, HIV / AIDS and psychosexual medicine. He was the Postgraduate Tutor in that Trust from 1992 to 1999.

He first qualified in Science with a degree in Microbiology in 1975, and then went on to do Medicine, in the hope of putting off the day when he would finally have to work for a living! He was never clever enough to ever become a “real proper doctor” and he liked talking to patients far too much to ever consider being a surgeon. Fortuitously, he ended up in a VD Clinic in Sir Patrick Dunn’s Hospital in Dublin, doing a session, and there – like St Paul on the road to Damascus, enlightenment. Here was just the job for your average repressed Irish Catholic. There was sex, shame, guilt, anxiety, confession, forgiveness and penance. He had found his niche!

He came to England in 1986 to explore the sexual diversity of Liverpool and finally to a Consultant post in Chester in 1990. As Postgraduate Tutor he infuriated and delighted; exposing the farce of fund holding, the idiocy of audit, and the small-minded bureaucracy of cynical governance. Most of all, he showed that life without “sex, love, passion and desire” is no life – at all, at all”.

He was elected as Chairman of the National Association of GU Doctors in 2001. He worked with the BBC and has done several programmes, the most popular of all being “Sex, warts and all” shown on BBC Choice 2002. He was the Sex Doctor on the BBC Choice website www.bbc.co.uk/choice/sexwartsandall/ answering questions by e-mail from distressed young people for a year, until the Daily Mail complained about soft porn on the BBC who then scrapped the site, December 2002. Some of the feature articles are now on the Chester Clinic Website.

Dr O’Mahony occasionally does after-dinner talks, and writes a regular piece in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Infections, entitled “Chester Chronicles” and an editorial “View from the frontline” in the INT J STD AIDS.