How do you treat what you can't define? Never a question to stop drug companies.
Many have pursued a drug for so-called female sexual dysfunction or FSD. Pfizer recently announced that Viagra (the erectile dysfunction drug) increased vaginal blood flow in rats, so they're continuing to test it with hopes it could help women whose "female sexual dysfunction" is caused by that problem.
Not everyone buys into the FSD picture. In their book, "Selling Sickness," Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels interview NYU psychologist Leonore Tiefer, who challanges the medicalization of women's sexual difficulties. She says, “Your body isn’t good enough. You aren’t good enough. You plus products…now maybe then you’re good enough." The authors write: "If there was no agreement on how to define or measure FSD, how on earth could a company show in a clinical trial that its drug had helped fix the dysfunction? If you can’t measure it, how can you market a pill to fix it?
One "probability sampling survey" published in the Journal of the American Medical Association 7 years ago estimated that 43% of U.S. women have sexual dysfunction. That authors of the "Selling Sickness" book say that estimate "will likely go down in history as one of the most abused medical statistics of our time."
But the estimate - weak though it may be - helps, if your goal is selling sickness.
For more on disease-mongering, see the website of this past year's Conference on Disease-Mongering in Australia.
And don't miss a special collection of articles on disease-mongering in PLoS Medicine.
Posted by schwitz at August 15, 2006 07:50 AM | TrackBack