Word: sexuality
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That doesn't keep drugmakers from trying to develop a treatment, seduced by the prospect of a multibillion-dollar blockbuster that could be even bigger than Viagra and its competitors combined. At a European conference for sexual medicine on Monday, a German pharmaceutical company presented results from a pivotal phase III clinical trial in North America and announced that it had found a drug that works. "We saw an increase in sexually satisfying events, an increase in desire and a decrease in distress. When we look at this against a backdrop of a common and distressing problem that affects...
...about a decade, roughly since the FDA approved Viagra for sexual dysfunction in men, drug companies have been searching for the female version of the little blue pill, a drug to cure what ails women like Wendy in bed. But what ails them - a psychiatric condition known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), defined as a distressing lack of sexual desire, absent other medical conditions - has been notoriously difficult to pin down. (See how to prevent illness...
Whether or not the FDA approves flibanserin to treat women's libidos, the German company's trial results have reignited a decade-long debate over the merit of the HSDD diagnosis - the most commonly diagnosed female sexual dysfunction - which some psychologists say is a made-up condition, promoted precisely for the service of moments like this: a drug-company rep at a conference on sex declaring that a treatment has been discovered...
Certainly, there may be women who will do better after taking flibanserin, says Judy Norsigian, executive director of the women's health advocacy Our Bodies Ourselves, based in Cambridge, Mass. But she thinks the diagnosis of HSDD unnecessarily medicalizes women's sexual lives. Attempting to treat low libido with a pill ignores the fact that many women's level of desire is deeply affected by everyday life stress and interpersonal relationships. Add to that a cultural milieu that at once promotes shame and ignorance about women's sexuality while wildly inflating their expectations for sex. In many cases, says Norsigian...
...being physically unable; rather, it's often that women lose interest in sex altogether, especially with the partner who once excited them. Beyond the many and varied psychological roots of the problem, there is still much that is not known about the biological processes governing women's sexual desire. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...