By ANTHONY STRONG
Last updated at 10:06 PM on 22nd October 2011
It may not have the romance of oysters and champagne, but the promise of a Don Juan performance in the bedroom made impotence drug Viagra into a billion-pound industry.
So it is no surprise that, since the late Nineties when the little blue pill came on to the market, pharmaceutical companies have been trying to find a female equivalent.
As a novelist, my own interest in the quest for ‘pink Viagra’ came about by accident. While looking for things to write about, I stumbled across a site that archived some scientific papers on the subject. There was immediate comic potential, which provided a background to my latest book. But the more I delved into it, the more I realised that behind the hilarity there is a serious debate.
Pill of promise: Pharmaceutical companies are racing to find the female equivalent
Is Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) – medically categorised as a lack of arousal or desire to have sex – as big a problem as the pharmaceutical giants would have us believe?
Certainly there were no major new discoveries about women and sexuality to suggest it is, yet suddenly a 1999 survey, brought out in the wake of Viagra’s runaway sales success (the NHS spends £58million a year on the drug), claimed 43 per cent of women suffered from FSD, compared with just 30 per cent of men who have erectile dysfunction.
But was this really a condition we hadn’t known about?
FSD – a catch-all term for any kind of sexual problem – is rapidly being redefined into myriad sub-disorders. What used to be called low sex drive is now ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’ (HSDD). Not getting turned on is ‘female sexual arousal disorder’ (FSAD); not reaching a climax with your partner is ‘anorgasmia’, while inability to relax is ‘sexual pain disorder’.
A critic might argue that the more disorders there are, the more potential cures there can be. And there are currently more than 20 in development, ranging from nasal sprays to skin patches.
Many, such as Intrinsa from Procter & Gamble, are based on testosterone, the male sex hormone. Although known as the male sex hormone, testosterone also occurs naturally in women, produced by the ovaries and the adrenal glands. However, levels decline with age.
Intrinsa is available in patch form on the NHS for post-menopausal women.
Yet to be approved are Galen’s treatment, described as ‘an intra-vaginal testosterone ring’, and BioSante, whose LibiGel you apply to the upper arm.
The suspicion, post-Viagra, is that these treatments will simply become lifestyle drugs bought over the counter and used by younger women with no sexual problems who simply want to increase their libido.
The same thing happened with Viagra. About 60 per cent of the men who use it are believed to have no erectile problems. Around 900,000 men in Britain have used it at least once.
Clinical trials for Flibanserin, a mood enhancer, and Tibolone, a hormone replacement, were apparently quite successful with post-menopausal women.
With clinical trials there are always two groups – those receiving treatment, and those led to believe they’re testing a treatment when they’re getting a placebo, or dummy pill. Neither the patient nor the doctor knows which is real and which is the dummy.
If a woman loses her sex drive at the same time as she becomes incapable of bearing children, why should science not restore that pleasure to her, if it can?
In many of these trials, placebo patients were also reporting improvements. One theory is that thinking about sex more might be enough to lead to greater performance. It may also be that, for some women, knowing they’re part of a trial leads to more intimacy, and hence better sex.
It’s easy to mock the naked greed with which the drugs companies are pursuing the potential profits to be made out of unresponsive women. But there are real questions to be asked here.
If a woman loses her sex drive at the same time as she becomes incapable of bearing children, why should science not restore that pleasure to her, if it can?
If Viagra is available to men on prescription, why not the equivalent to women?
For me, wooing a woman – flirting, appreciating her, finding how to operate the mysterious conduits of her desire – is part of the process of discovering you’re romantically compatible. Sex may be biology, but true love is a far more complex chemistry.
Chemistry For Beginners, by Anthony Strong, is published by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2052229/Do-really-need-pink-viagra-A-best-selling-author-investigates-world-female-sexual-dysfunction.html
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