Posted on 01/03/2003 5:51:37 PM PST by blam
Female impotence is a 'sponsored creation'
January 02 2003 at 03:34PM
Paris - A leading medical journal has blasted drugs companies, accusing them of inventing the "disease" of female impotence to help create a lucrative market for Viagra-style treatments aimed at women.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) says that for the past six years, the pharmaceutical industry had funded and driven an effort to have the theory of "female sexual dysfunction" clinically confirmed and widely disseminated.
Many of the researchers who have published papers or attended conferences on the supposed disorder have financial links with drugs companies, it says in an editorial to appear in next Saturday's issue.
Moreover, the scientific evidence for female sexual dysfunction is often misplaced or absent, and much of it is bent on stoking ideas that inhibited sexual desire is medically abnormal, it adds.
'The corporate sponsored creation of a disease is not a new phenomenon' It notes how a study of the genitalia of female white rabbits, focussing on some of the animals' "vaginal engorgement" and "clitoral erectile insufficiency," was used to draw a parallel about the physical state of women.
Despite these concerns, the media have enthusiastically picked up a figure, criticised by some experts as inflated, that 43 percent of women over 18 suffer from sexual dysfunction, the BMJ says.
The danger, says the editorial, is the obsession with medicalisation, the idea that sexual problems are invariably rooted in physical causes and can be cured by simply taking a pill.
That approach perilously trivialises why some women may have a lack of sexual desire, it says. Stress, tiredness or threatening or abusive behaviour by their partners could be a cause, it says.
"The corporate sponsored creation of a disease is not a new phenomenon, but the making of female sexual dysfunction is the freshest, clearest example we have," says the editorial, written by Ray Moynihan of the Australian Financial Review.
"The potential risk, in a process so heavily sponsored by drug companies, is that the complex social, personal and physical causes of sexual difficulties, and the range of solutions to them, will be swept away in the rush to diagnose, label and prescribe." - Sapa-AFP
There was an article in the WSJ recently which discussed the push to use anti-depressants to treat shopaholics. (If anyone has access to the on-line version I hope they post it here.) The uncontrollable urge to spend is now considered a mental disorder by some.
Perhaps the two trends are related.
Stress, tiredness or threatening or abusive behaviour by their partners could be a cause, it says.
Yes, and I remember the hoops the medicos had many men go through in the early days of Viagra to get a scrip, using these same words. Would you believe group counselling? For that private a problem? It's a fact. "It's in your head, relax, stop drinking coffee, eat more bran..." The guys usually nodded, got the stuff off the Internet, and finding that it worked, dispensed with the "it's all in your head" crapola. There is more than one interest group at work here, and if the pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest, so do the headshrinkers.
I wrote a letter to the editor (not published for some reason) which merely said: "New hope for Hillary."
--Boris
Not so, or they would have the same sex drive as men and be satisfied just as easily, every time. Most of them were short changed for whatever the cause. What a shame.
Gee... it feels abnormal to me.
Is this striking you as kind of sexist? I mean, I know that men are gonna have a bigger appetite than women, but for healthy childbearing-age women in a healthy relationship having no desire even during ovulation, there definitely is some change going on that is undesirable. Can you imagine if an article was written saying 'male impotence' is not really much of a problem?
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