FDA Questions Safety Of Female Viagra

June 17, 2010

The Wall Street Journal

By Jennifer Corbett Dooren

U.S. regulators questioned the effectiveness of a proposed drug for treating low-sex drive in women and raised concerns about how safe the pill would be if used widely.

The drug, flibanserin, developed by German pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingelheim GMBH, is currently under review at the Food and Drug Administration as a proposed treatment for hypoactive sexual-desire disorder, or HSDD, in pre-menopausal women.

Flibanserin is set to come before the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee on Friday. The panel of outside medical experts will vote whether to recommend flibanserin—called “female Viagra” or “pink Viagra,” after Pfizer Inc.’s blue pill to treat erectile dysfunction in men—for approval. The FDA usually follows the panel’s recommendation.

At present, there are no FDA-approved products to treat low-sex desire in women. An FDA review of flibanserin released Wednesday in advance of the vote suggests flibanserin faces an uphill path.

In 2004, an FDA panel unanimously voted down a Procter & Gamble Co. testosterone patch that aimed to boost sexual desire in women. The panel said the benefit of slightly increasing the number of sexually “satisfying” events wasn’t significant enough to outweigh unknown safety risks.

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Norman Human Problems Spiking Healthcare Costs

May 28, 2010

Natural News

By Sherry Baker

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine has a huge new growth industry underway — the “medicalization” of the human condition. That’s the conclusion of a study headed by Brandeis University sociologist Peter Conrad that was just published in the journal Social Science and Medicine. The report, the first study of its kind, documents that over the last several decades, numerous common problems — many of which are simply due to being human — have been newly defined as medical disorders that supposedly need prescription drugs and other costly treatments.

For example, menopause is a perfectly natural part of womanhood but it is now considered a “condition” complete with symptoms that physicians often believe need treatment with hormones and anti-depressants. Likewise, normal pregnancies, taking longer-than-average time to get pregnant and impotence (now known by the medical term “erectile dysfunction”) are all now seen as medical conditions that may need intense medical monitoring and treatment. And if a child fidgets in class — bingo! He or she is frequently classified as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and quickly placed on stimulant drugs like Ritalin

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