Friday, June 5, 2015

Pink female SEX pill approved by FDA

Rob Stein (npr.org); Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; New York Times
Now you're all wet, baby! - Shut up, you sexist jerk with your for-profit science.
Oh-my-bodhisattva, what have I done under placebo?
For 15 years, Carla Price and her husband's sex life was great. But then things began to change.
 
"Before, I would want to have sex," says Price, who is 50 and lives in central Missouri. "But over the years my sexual desire has just dwindled to nothing."
 
Price has no idea why. She's healthy. She's not really stressed out about anything. And she's still totally crazy about her husband.
 
A screen shot from the documentary "Orgasm Inc."
Poison all problems.
"It's not that our relationship got boring," Price says. "Because it's actually the opposite -- we became closer as we got older together."

"We live in a culture that has historically discounted the importance of sexual pleasure and sexual desire for women." 
- Terry O'Neill, president, National Organization for Women 

Junior Anti-Sex League (1984)
But her lack of interest in sex almost wrecked their marriage.
 
"It did get to the point where my husband thought that perhaps we just needed to divorce," she says.
 
Women like Price, who see their decreasing sex drive as a problem, are at the center of an intense, emotional debate that's been raging for years over whether the Food and Drug Administration should approve the first drug that claims to boost a woman's libido [sexual desire].
 
NPR reached Price through Sprout Pharmaceuticals Inc., the company that makes the drug.
 
Mountains of "little blue pills" and their chemical kin have transformed the way many people think about sex and aging.
A sea of chemicals
"Men have a number of treatment options for sexual dysfunction, says Cindy Whitehead, Sprout's CEO. "We haven't yet gotten to one for women's most common dysfunction."
 
"Up until now," she says, "the treatment paradigm for women with sexual dysfunction has essentially been: Let's take a drug that works in men and let's see if it works in women."

"The misrepresentation that 'everybody should be having it... has a problem if they don't have it,' is to change what sexuality is into more of a medical thing." 
- Leonore Tiefer, psychologist, New York University 
If you struggle you'll fail (LiH).
None of them did. But Sprout's drug, flibanserin, takes a totally different approach than, say, Viagra. Instead of increasing blood flow to the genitals, flibanserin affects a different part of the body: the brain.
 
Flibanserin shifts the balance of three key brain chemicals, Whitehead says. The drug, she says, increases "excitatory factors for sex" -- dopamine and norepinephrine -- and decreases serotonin, which can dampen the sex drive.
 
But there's a lot of skepticism about flibanserin. The FDA has rejected it twice, saying there wasn't much evidence it works. The agency also questioned the drug's safety, especially with long-term, daily use.
 
Sprouts' Whitehead (Allen G. Breed/AP)
"The combination of...not very robust effectiveness, and the fact that the safety profile had not been really characterized very well at all made us reach that conclusion, that it really wasn't ready for approval," says Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs.
 
The company acknowledges flibanserin can have side effects, including sleepiness, nausea, and dizziness. And there are no results yet, Sprout says, on whether the drug might interfere with the [presumably] helpful action of Zoloft, Prozac, or other SSRI antidepressants, which are thought to work primarily by boosting levels of serotonin in the brain.
 
"Women...want drugs that work.
And this doesn't seem to be one of them." 
- Cindy Pearson, executive director, National Women's Health Network
 
But Whitehead argues that flibanserin is safe and says the company's studies show it can help many women.
 
Katherine Streeter for NPR
Testosterone power!
"We increase their desire by 53 percent," she says of study participants. "We decrease their distress by 29 percent, and then they doubled their number of satisfying sexual events."
 
Whitehead argues the FDA is holding flibanserin to a higher standard than it uses to evaluate drugs for men. And some women's rights advocates worry that might be true.
Choose sex over hypocrisy (Stivers)
"We live in a culture that has historically discounted the importance of sexual pleasure and sexual desire for women," says Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. "And I fear that it's that cultural attitude that men's sexual health is extremely important, but women's sexual health is not so important. That's the cultural attitude that I want to be sure the FDA has not, maybe unconsciously, imported into its deliberative process." More
Patriarchy: When sex goes wrong
Patriarchs Dick Cheney and fellow Christian Republican Dennis Hastert, D.C. (AP)

.
Oops, wrong party. - Not so fast, Jeff.
What could go wrong as we medicate every perceived problem and inconvenience in America? The medical system has money it needs to make, and we have problems we need solved, so what if our livers suffer in the process of chasing easy cures? Why look into the deeper causes -- institutional sexism, bias, childhood sexual trauma, emotional and physical harm, oppression, and shaming... Then there are the hypocrites and molesters -- Catholic Christian priests, conservative Republican lawmakers, military comrades, and so on.

The gay Church fathers made me do it!
Closet homosexual child molester former Republican House Speaker Hastert: But years before [her brother's] death, his sister said, he told her that his first homosexual contact was with [former Republican House Speaker, former high school teacher and coach, nominal Christian, and hypocrite] Hastert and that it lasted throughout his high school years.

Let's keep this quiet, says hypocrite Hastert
[Her brother] Stephen Reinboldt attended Yorkville High School, where Hastert was a history teacher and coach from 1965 to 1981. In an interview aired Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Burdge said Hastert had been a [homosexual] father figure to her [molested] brother but also caused him irreparable harm [through rape and ongoing sexual abuse]. More
 
Yum, yum, that's terrible! I mean, really, guys, quit it! (Rick Perry)
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