Founder of Cushing Counseling Presents at University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference
Introducing Sex Therapy Pro — a clinician-led, AI-powered platform designed to close the persistent gap in sexual health education across medical and health professions training
Founder of Cushing Counseling & Sex Therapy Pro Vanessa Cushing LPC, NCC, CST presenting on bridging the gap for medical professionals and sexual wellness information.
The founder of Cushing Counseling — a licensed therapist and certified sex therapist — took the stage at the University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference to present Sex Therapy Pro, a nationally launched AI-powered sexual wellness education platform developed to address one of medicine's most underacknowledged training gaps: sexual health education for clinicians and the patients they serve.
University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference 2025 Presentation: "Sex Therapy Pro: A Clinician-Led AI Model for Bridging the Gap in Sexual Health Education"
Presented by the Founder & Director, Cushing Counseling · Licensed Therapist & Certified Sex Therapist
Participants got put sticky notes on the presentation to collect data on how much sexual education they recieved in their medical training - most participants had 2 hours or less.
Why This Presentation Matters
Sexual health is not peripheral to medicine — it is woven into nearly every clinical specialty. From primary care to oncology, from mental health to urology, patients bring concerns about desire, arousal, pain, identity, and intimacy into the exam room every day. Yet the clinicians expected to respond to these concerns are, more often than not, undertrained to do so.
This presentation at the University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference placed that problem squarely in front of a medical education audience — and introduced a scalable, evidence-based solution built by a clinician who has spent her career working at the intersection of therapy, sex therapy, and public health.
~0 hrsStandardized sexual health training in most medical school curricula
100%AI trained on peer-reviewed research & foundational sex therapy texts
2025National platform launch serving individuals, couples & clinicians
The Problem: Medicine's Blind Spot in Sexual Health
Research presented at the conference underscored a striking reality: most medical students receive only a few hours of sexual health instruction across their entire training. There are no standardized national requirements, resulting in wide variability between institutions and leaving graduates unprepared to assess, discuss, or manage sexual health concerns in clinical practice.
The consequences extend directly to patients. When clinicians are uncomfortable or underprepared, they avoid the conversation. When the conversation doesn't happen, patients' sexual health concerns go unaddressed — compounding shame, reducing quality of life, and contributing to downstream physical and psychological health consequences.
This is the gap Cushing Counseling's founder set out to close.
Responsibly governed, clinician-led AI can extend sexual health education beyond limited curricular hours while preserving ethical oversight and clinical accuracy.
— Cushing Counseling Founder, University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference 2025
The Innovation: Sex Therapy Pro
Sex Therapy Pro is a clinician-led, AI-powered sexual wellness education platform developed specifically to address this training gap. It is intentionally designed as a psychoeducational and therapeutic-adjunct tool — not a diagnostic instrument or clinical replacement — positioning it responsibly within the continuum of care.
The platform's AI was trained exclusively on peer-reviewed research and foundational sex therapy literature, and operates within a tightly constrained, evidence-informed framework grounded in:
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — addressing maladaptive patterns related to sexual function, anxiety, and identity
Mindfulness-Based Approaches — building embodied awareness, presence, and arousal regulation
Attachment Theory — understanding relational and interpersonal dynamics in sexual health contexts
Contemporary Sex Therapy Models — integrating current clinical frameworks for desire, arousal, and pain disorders
Ethics and Governance by Design
A centerpiece of the conference presentation was the platform's governance architecture. Sex Therapy Pro was built with clinical ethics at its foundation:
Explicit prevention of erotic content generation
Trauma-informed, consent-centered language protocols throughout all platform interactions
Active referral pathways to licensed clinical care when concerns are identified
LGBTQIA+-affirming frameworks embedded across all content and communication
These features reflect the clinical judgment and professional values of the therapist who built the platform — and distinguish Sex Therapy Pro from general-purpose AI tools applied to sensitive health topics.
What the Platform Offers
Launched nationally in 2025 as a web-based platform, Sex Therapy Pro provides tiered access for multiple user populations — individuals, couples, clinicians, and health professions educators. Core features include:
Guided desire and arousal psychoeducational exercises
Pain-informed sexual health education modules
Consent and communication frameworks and scripting tools
Clinician-facing educational resources for professional development and continuing education
The platform is organized around four defining clinical and ethical commitments:
LGBTQIA+ AffirmingTrauma-InformedEthical AI UseInterdisciplinary Collaboration
Bridging Medicine and Mental Health
A recurring theme throughout the presentation was the need for genuine interdisciplinary collaboration between medical providers and mental health clinicians around sexual health. Sex Therapy Pro supports this integration — providing a shared educational language, evidence base, and resource infrastructure for clinicians across specialties working toward patient-centered sexual health care.
Early Outcomes and Impact
Early data from the platform's national rollout demonstrate meaningful results. Users report strong engagement with the educational tools and high perceived usefulness in building sexual health literacy. Among clinician users, the platform is associated with reduced discomfort and increased confidence when addressing sexual health topics with patients.
For patients and general users, two outcomes stand out: a reduction in shame — one of the most significant barriers to seeking sexual health support — and a greater sense of agency in navigating sexual wellness concerns. Together, these early indicators suggest that Sex Therapy Pro is doing precisely what it was designed to do: making evidence-based sexual health education more accessible, more normalized, and more clinically actionable.
A Broader Signal for Medical Education
The appearance of a clinician-led AI sexual health platform at a major medical innovations conference is itself significant. It reflects a growing recognition within academic medicine that digital and AI tools have a legitimate, carefully governed role in addressing persistent gaps in health professions education — particularly in domains that have historically been underfunded, stigmatized, or overlooked in formal curricula.
What distinguishes Sex Therapy Pro from the broader landscape of AI health tools is precisely its clinician authorship and governance. This is not a technology company building a health product. It is a licensed therapist and certified sex therapist building a clinical education tool — with the ethical grounding, theoretical rigor, and professional accountability that entails.
The University of Miami Medical Innovations Conference provided a fitting venue to make that case to the medical education community — and to invite broader collaboration between mental health, medicine, and responsible AI in service of patient care.
