Vulvodynia is a term that every doctor with an interest in vulval disease has heard of and read about. You will notice, however, that it is not the name of this chapter. This is because vulvodynia is by definition a collection of symptoms, not a disease entity in itself.

Vulvodynia is in fact a poorly defined concept that simply means vulval pain. When your patient presents with vulval pain, you need to sort her into a meaningful diagnostic group. The management of each sub-type is different. There is no single therapy that can be applied to all patients yet the existing literature on the subject can give the impression that there is.

Vulvodynia is a term developed by the International Society for the Study of Vulvar Disease (ISSVD) in 1983. Their current definition is ‘vulvar discomfort, most often described as burning pain, occurring in the absence of relevant visible findings or a specific, clinically identifiable neurologic disorder’.