[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Restless Vagina Syndrome

[Bill Totten]

by Terry J Allen

In These Times (October 27 2009)


It's not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner's), that
you don't orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the
libido of a seventeen-year-old boy. You have a disease: Female Sexual
Dysfunction, and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some
degree of impaired sexual function", according to a Journal of the
American Medical Association article. The Food and Drug
Administration's evolving definition of Female Sexual Dysfunction
includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm
difficulties - but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug
company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure
billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the
time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the Food and Drug
Administration has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short.
Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal
implant that rarely works - and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for
$60 per month, pop LexaFem pills - containing (how-could-it-not-work)
"horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today".
Its website promises, "You won't ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem
in your arsenal".

But the big swinging dicks of global Female Sexual Dysfunction
marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer - whose stop-gap
strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for
men, and Procter & Gamble, which, using the same logic, has put its
money on testosterone.

Viagra's failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped
doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. Female Sexual
Dysfunction is "a classic example of starting with some preconceived,
and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women's sexual
dysfunctions, based on the male model", said John Bancroft, director of
the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical
Journal).

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone.
Despite Food and Drug Administration refusal to approve Procter &
Gamble's testosterone patch Intrinsa, US doctors wrote two million
off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer's little blue
pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn't really work for women. No wonder:
Researchers don't even know what constitutes a "normal" female
testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as
likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And
as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm,
Inc, (www.orgasminc.org), testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen,
which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to
porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a
compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them,
and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a
rash of conflicts of interest.

A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more
diseased than their American counterparts, with "69.6 percent
experiencing some form of Female Sexual Dysfunction", according to the
Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported
supplement on Female Sexual Dysfunction. Journal editor and urologist
Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. "Science is science", he
says. "It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data
shows." Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than
independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps
the bottom line Dr Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid
consultant for drug companies, including Procter & Gamble and Pfizer.

Goldstein established an Female Sexual Dysfunction clinic with Dr
Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on
Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received
financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped
define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including
Pfizer, had financial ties to eighteen of the nineteen authors of that
panel's report, the revealed.

"Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with
nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose
of comprehensive sex education", says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits
female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can't find: your brain
and your funny bone. 

_____

Terry J Allen, an In These Times senior editor, has written the
magazine’s monthly investigative health and science column since 2005.

Please consider subscribing to the print edition and supporting
independent media: http://www.inthesetimes.com/subscribe/

This article is permanently archived at:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/5016/

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5016/restless_vagina_syndrome/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/