Dr Anand Patel

It is why a man can talk his doctor through every detail of his chest pain and then go quiet when the conversation turns to erectile difficulty, low libido or fertility. Nothing about the body has changed. Only what he has been taught is allowed to be said out loud.

It is the reason so many men wait years before asking a question that could have been answered in five minutes.

From biology teacher to physician

He qualified at King's College London in 2000 and gained his MRCP in 2004. Before settling into general practice he spent a year at Brighton College as Head of Sex Education and a biology teacher, and that year turned out to matter more than it looked. Standing in front of a room of teenagers taught him how to explain a difficult, embarrassing subject to people who are not yet ready to hear it. He has been doing exactly that ever since.

Training the next generation

He trained as a GP in Mid Sussex and later became a GP partner and a training programme director in Worthing, which meant the doctors he taught were learning from someone who had already decided that the awkward questions were part of the job, not an interruption to it.

The first of a new kind of specialist

In 2012 he was awarded the Fellowship of the European Committee of Sexual Medicine in its first ever cohort. There was no established route into this work in the UK at the time, so he took the one qualification that existed. It is still the only Europe wide recognised qualification in sexual medicine.

Where the science and the silence meet

His week runs across three worlds that rarely talk to each other. NHS general practice at Binfield Road Surgery in Lambeth. The Centre for Men's Health on Harley Street, where he works on testosterone deficiency, erectile dysfunction and the psychological side of sexual health. And the Jonathan Ramsay Male Fertility Clinic, where he carries out male fertility assessments, hormonal profiling and genetic screening, and quietly corrects an assumption that has cost couples years: that a fertility problem is the woman's to investigate first.

He also gives medical oversight to Manual and Optimale, two digital men's health services, because if men are going to ask these questions on a phone at midnight rather than in a waiting room, the answers they get there have to be held to a clinical standard.

Where male health meets South Asian risk

His research follows a thread that matters a great deal in our communities. Low testosterone is linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and all three fall harder on South Asian men. So the question a man is too embarrassed to ask is often the same question that would have flagged something else years earlier. He sits on the executive committee of the British Society for Sexual Medicine and is secretary of the Primary Care Testosterone Advisory Group, which is how that argument gets made to other doctors rather than only to patients.

Many people will know his face before they know any of this. He was the resident doctor on the E4 reboot of Embarrassing Bodies, the host of Channel 4's Celebrity Save Our Sperm, and the resident GP on BBC Two's Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. Television, for him, is the same job as the biology classroom: get the subject into the room before anyone has had to raise their hand.

Sharm survives on silence. Take the silence away and it has nothing left to live on. That is the whole of his career in one line: he has spent it giving men somewhere else to put it.