Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals - how drug companies exploit female sexual dysfunction for profit

Saturday, May 21, 2011 by: Daniel Erickson
Tags: female sexual dysfunction, drugs, health news

(NaturalNews) In the last decade, many American women have begun to question their libidos. Even though just twenty years ago, women accepted the ebbs and flows of their sex drive, something has changed. Many now hope for something to help them keep up with their partners, in the bedroom. They see their desire as falling short of what it should be. Now, for some strange reason, there is a new standard that many women feel they are falling short of.

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction illuminates the answer, illustrating the ways in which multi-million dollar marketing and research campaigns have affected our expectations of intimacy. This must-read exposes the careful manipulation of data that pharmaceutical companies have cultivated for the last fifteen years, to create a disease that they plan to cure.

Some may have heard of this disorder/dysfunction - Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) or Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), which has made steady ground in the medical community. But even more have already been affected by other, more subversive attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to raise the bar for female sex drive, which pervade our entertainment and news sources.

In their book, journalist Ray Moynihan and Dr. Barbara Mintzes investigate this newly classified phenomenon, the massive promotion campaign behind it, and the coincidental development of flibanserin, a drug that purports to be the artificial answer. Along the way, they unearth a chain of strong financial affiliations between some of the most respected medical journals and pharmacological businesses, as well as how easily hard data can be manipulated for potential gain.

There have been articles published in respected medical journals that almost half of all women are affected by FSD or HSDD, and these publications alone would be enough to convince most people of their claims. However, Moynihan, in over ten years of investigations in the pharmaceutical industry, provides a critical case for doubt. Citing interviews with professionals in pharma who were intimately involved with the development of FSD or HSDD and tell the true story, the book undermines FSD, at the very least, as a gross inflation of a rare problem.

The investigative reporting in this piece of investigative journalism is disturbingly healthy. One walks away with a clearer view of sexuality and of how business pervades contemporary medicine. Regarding the former, one feels empowered; regarding the latter, one chillingly becomes more mindful of the powerful influence the media can have over the most intimate areas of our lives.

Moynihan is also the author of Ten Questions You Must Ask Your Doctor, and his most recent title, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Drug Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients. Over the past ten years, Moynihan's voice has become increasingly strong and compelling in the US and the globe. He has also published numerous articles, including a series on changing childhood obesity guidelines in the US, reviewed at https://www.naturalnews.com/020017_obesity_ch....

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction is on the shelves now, online and in bookstores.