"Restless Vagina Syndrome": Big Pharma's Newest Fake Disease

[Le Libérer]

"The FDA's evolving definition of FSD [female sexual dysfunction] includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties -- but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it."


"Restless Vagina Syndrome": Big Pharma's Newest Fake Disease
By Terry J. Allen, In These Times. Posted November 3, 2009.

The pharmaceutical industry wants you to think that if you don't have sex like a porn star, you're in need of their drugs.



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 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), 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 FDA’s evolving definition of FSD 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 FDA 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/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 FSD 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 (P&G), 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. FSD 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 FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 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 FSD," according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. 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 P&G and Pfizer.
Goldstein established an FSD 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 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ 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. 
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it is absolutely abnormal for you not to have a porn star libido and fuck like rabid bunnies all day long. but here is a solution, go ahead and pump yourselves full of pills while you help the pharmaceutical industry make big bucks. It's a win-win situation but if you ask me, I call it fraud.

[Muzk]

Yeah, yeah,
of course women are easy targets of such things, just as much as males are for hormone/proteine shakes or any other kind of things, you only need to get some commercial campaign rolling, and there's your profit

I love women, they are much more open for things such as ideas of revolution. As a woman you can really "feel" the discrimination, and as soon as they see that it's the system itself - there we have another revolutionary

Anyways I really don't know what to say about this... there's obvious discrimination going on of the "weaker" gender, but why won't they do something about it? Better keep on trying to turn people into the right direction... that's all we can do. Yes, yes...

Damn, I too hate the pharma industry / healthcare in general, not only because of the fact that they use more money on advertising than on researching, but because they can't cure me, and I got to wait for months until I get to see the doctor
----
Anyways, just the other day in politics class, some girl held some kind of "speech" about politicians, it really touched me, it had some real criticizm in it, I quickly looked at my comrade and saw that he too listened carefully. After class I talked to her, trying to make her think into the right direction. I asked her: What do you think, how could you change that? She said; "Dunno, become a politician" I might just be able to influence her on politics, we'll see!

[Schrödinger's Cat]

[FONT=Arial]Better yet, these companies could simply market books to men entitled, "Yes, She Deserves Fun Under the Sheets Too" and make fortunes learning that one of the biggest issues with sex is the focus around male pleasure. Well, the male-centric view of pleasure originating from vaginal intercourse instead of foreplay or the clitoris.

This sounds awfully familiar...
[/FONT]

[Sasha]

yeah, for some reason it also remindedme of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

[MilitantWorker]

Forget the pill...I want to be marketed as the cure for THIS disease

[Sasha]

dude, that must be among the most stuppid reply's ever on revleft.....

[Rjevan]

Honestly, are we not all moved to tears by the loving care of the different industries? They all constantly explain why I feel so bad, am so depressed and would kill myself the very next second if I wouldn't be rescued by their gifts towards humanity! And now another one is ahead!

Again, isn't it great to know that the pharma industry knows how "normal" women should have sex and tells them so? Really awesome, every woman has the chance to clearly realise that she is a complete looser, abnormal and has a serious problem after reading this stuff but not enough, no, luckily the pharma industry -may the lord bless them!- offers help and makes her "feel like a real woman today" - for only 60$ a month! Oh joy!!!
What would women do without the pharma industry?

[Le Libérer]

Honestly, are we not all moved to tears by the loving care of the different industries? They all constantly explain why I feel so bad, am so depressed and would kill myself the very next second if I wouldn't be rescued by their gifts towards humanity! And now another one is ahead!

Again, isn't it great to know that the pharma industry knows how "normal" women should have sex and tells them so? Really awesome, every woman has the chance to clearly realise that she is a complete looser, abnormal and has a serious problem after reading this stuff but not enough, no, luckily the pharma industry -may the lord bless them!- offers help and makes her "feel like a real woman today" - for only 60$ a month! Oh joy!!!
What would women do without the pharma industry?

Exactly but dont forget, she doesnt have a disease unless she feels "personal distress" about it."

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

dude, that must be among the most stuppid reply's ever on revleft.....

It's not his fault. He's suffering from restless dick syndrome.

Anyway, the "syndrome" is pretty ridiculous. That being said, if drugs are available to increase the sex drive of men or women, they should be able to take them if they like. I think it's pretty cool that someone can drug themselves up and have sex for hours at a time. Of course, the dishonesty here is claiming it is a disease. The title of the disease makes it even more ridiculous.

[Girl A]

yeah, for some reason it also remindedme of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

This.

[Sov]

Just because Big Pharma is capitalizing off sexual repression doesn't negate that it's a real problem.

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 17-year-old boy.

Interesting gender stereotyping.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease.

The popular narrative most often promoted in the corporate media and academia is that "normal" women are less interested in sex than men. This author is echoing that narrative.

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone.

Uh, testosterone is a female sex hormone, too.

[Aeval]

Interesting gender stereotyping.

What, that 17-year-old boys tend to have a high libido then most people in general? Or that an awful lot of (most?) women don't have an orgasm every time they have sex?

The popular narrative most often promoted in the corporate media and academia is that "normal" women are less interested in sex than men. This author is echoing that narrative.

I think that the article is really saying about how those women who have 'less' interest in sex shouldn't be made to feel like they're ill just because they aren't as into it as they're 'suppose' to be. But please, show me where it implies that 'normal' women are less interested in sex than men.

Uh, testosterone is a female sex hormone, too.

Testosterone is a hormone found also in women, which this article does not deny:

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.

but it is generally known as the male hormone because it has a much larger role to play in men than it does it women. Just like how oestrogen is found in males but is thought of as being a 'female' hormone - there's a clue in the name.