A Pill That Boosts a Woman's Sex Drive from qocsuing's blog

A Pill That Boosts a Woman's Sex Drive

IN ITS LATEST attempt to kick-start lady libidos with a pill, Sprout Pharmaceuticals announced this week that it will resubmit its female sex drug, flibanserin, for FDA approval. If it gets the okay, the drug would be the first prescription of its kind for women in the United States: a treatment for female hypoactive sexual disorder, or a low sex drive.To get more news about vigrx oil review, you can visit vigrxplus-original.com official website.

More than a dozen drugs that address some kind of sexual dysfunction already are available in the US. But since Viagra's little blue pill hit the market, nearly all of the approved sex drugs have targeted men, despite the oft-cited statistic that nearly half of American women report some sexual dissatisfaction—notably more than their counterparts. While the FDA has approved medications for women that ease sex-related pain post-menopause, it hasn't approved a more general sex aid, like the erectile dysfunction drugs available for men.

Patients, doctors, and activists have called this imbalance sexist, and the FDA has named female sexual dysfunction a top priority "disease area." (To be clear, there are also no drugs for men that target perceived problems with the desire for sex, just the hydraulics that make erection possible.) But for Leonore Tiefer, an outspoken clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU, the lack of drugs isn’t the problem—we are.

After a lengthy career as a sex therapist, Tiefer has spent more than a decade arguing against the aggressive labeling of so-called sex disorders and the impulse to treat them with drugs. She blames the country's medicalization of sex on a pharmaceutical industry hellbent on driving profit by stoking anxieties about "normal" sexual behavior—not to mention aggressive advertising campaigns, media, and news stories marginalizing diverse and individual desires.

Now, as companies like Sprout test dozens of products for women—pills, vaginal gels, even nasal sprays—in a race to sell the first “pink Viagra,” Tiefer asks us to question if we need it at all.

When did people start asking, “Okay, where’s the sex drug for women?”
Three months after Viagra was approved in 1998, The New York Times ran a front-page article about it. Nobody I knew was asking that question. I think the media wanted a different angle—the media kind of lost it entirely when Viagra was approved.
They can have side effects—cardiovascular effects, cancer effects. They also have to be taken chronically—as opposed to Viagra, where's it's pop one and you're out. And they weren’t better than the placebos. These drugs “work” for some women in the same way that Viagra “works” for some men. Every sex drug, including Viagra, has an inordinately high placebo rate. A lot of people hope it will work, expect it will work, and then they feel better. But—it’s a well-kept secret—the represcription rate for Viagra is less than half. It doesn’t work all that well, and the side effects are extremely annoying. We still don’t even know whether blood flow is really the main mechanism of action.

If it’s not that effective, how has Viagra become so popular?
Viagra was the first drug to really take advantage of direct-to-consumer advertising, especially on TV, after the FDA loosened restrictions in 1997. The pharmaceutical industry underwent a big change in the '90s from focusing on diseases to focusing on lifestyle issues. But the lifestyle issues, like weight and sleep loss, had to be framed as medical conditions to fetch the high prices of medications.

So since the '90s, conversations about sexuality have become much more focused on achieving “normal function,” the necessity of “normal functions,” the rewards of “normal functions.” Viagra has turned the public understanding of sexuality in a direction that I don’t think is beneficial. But, from the industry’s point of view, it’s all about profits. There’s nothing complicated about that.