Articles Analyze Debate Surrounding Female Sexual Dysfunction Drug Flibanserin

The Los Angeles Times and New York Times recently examined issues related to the experimental female libido drug flibanserin. On June 18, an FDA advisory panel voted 11-0 against recommending the drug for treatment of female hypoactive sexual-desire disorder. Summaries appear below.

~ Los Angeles Times: FDA's review of flibanserin has reinvigorated "a long-standing debate over how to define, diagnose and treat low sexual desire" in women, the Los Angeles Times reports. Some experts contend that female sexual dysfunction could presumably be treated with a medication, while others argue "that a woman's sexuality is far too complex and is affected by too many other aspects of her life to be reduced to treatment with a pill," according to the Times. Not only are the causes of low sexual desire "nearly innumerable," but people have varying reactions to libido levels, and there is no medical consensus regarding "normal" human sexual behavior, the Times reports (Ogilvie, Los Angeles Times, 6/28).

~ New York Times: "The parabola of hype and deflation" surrounding flibanserin "illustrates the challenges that drugmakers are likely to face as they expand further into quality-of-life issues like sex from more familiar and saturated chronic-problem categories like high cholesterol," the New York Times reports. To begin with, physicians and regulators are less likely to accept side effects when considering drugs that are designed to improve a patient's quality of life, rather than save a life. Meanwhile, critics of the pharmaceutical industry argue that quests for new treatments are "stoking existing social anxieties" more than they are benefiting patients. Pharmaceutical companies have tried to develop a female desire drug via three different medical avenues -- the circulatory system, the endocrine system and the nervous system -- which "may indicate that female desire is so complicated" that treatment with multiple therapies is required, according to the Times (Singer, New York Times, 6/25).

New York Times Opinion Piece Discusses Low Libido Among U.S. Middle Class

Camille Paglia, an author and humanities and media studies professor at the University of the Arts, writes in a Times opinion piece that "[p]harmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra -- not in this culture driven and drained by middle-class values," such as overachievement, androgyny and "efficient bodies" (Paglia, New York Times, 6/25).


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