Originally published July 27 2005
Drug manufacturers and some medical experts butt heads over Female Sexual Dysfunction
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Female Sexual Dysfunction is generally defined as a decline in desire for sexual contact in a woman who is bothered by the decline, but, while drug manufacturers and some experts say the affliction should be more clearly defined, the Duluth News Tribune reports that other experts say the so-called disease is a case study on pharmaceutical funds leading researchers to bundle problems together as a disease.
Those experts, backed by drug companies, for years have been pushing the medical establishment to incorporate that sort of standard into a new definition for a condition called "female sexual dysfunction," or FSD.
Today, FSD has all the trappings of a well-established disease: spokespeople, alarming statistics, a political lobby, a medical specialty and an academic journal.
The focus on women's sexual problems was fueled by the development of Viagra, the male-impotence drug that has generated billions of dollars in sales for Pfizer.
"The meeting is completely supported by pharmaceutical companies, and approximately half of the audience will be pharmaceutical representatives," the organizer, psychologist Raymond Rosen of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, wrote in the e-mailed invitation, later quoted in the British Medical Journal.
Meanwhile, in March 1998, the FDA approved Viagra for use in impotent men.
Sales were instantly enormous, and the sex lives of many impotent men and their partners were changed.
Treatment mostly consisted of psychotherapy and counseling.
Some physicians were prescribing estrogen as well as off-label, or unapproved, use of testosterone to women for sex-related problems.
Therapist Laura Berman, director of a women's sexual-health center in Chicago, said that, in general, urologists had seized the initiative and set a more drug-friendly agenda, bringing along like-minded psychologists.
The most influential "loud voice" was Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a Boston urologist and admitted workaholic who consulted for Pfizer on Viagra and has played a leading role in trying to define FSD.
Goldstein was among those attending a crucial meeting involving FSD in Paris in June 2003.
Goldstein and his colleagues at the conference hoped to hammer out a definition of and treatment guidelines for FSD that could be used to treat women around the globe.
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