Two in five American women suffer from sexual dysfunction, yet only recently have drug companies tried to find a chemical treatment for this problem. With the rising success of erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra and Cialis, the drug industry has rushed to capitalize on the other half of the population with a pill that boosts the female libido. The German pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Ingelheim, thought they'd struck gold with the "pink viagra" Flibanserin, but the FDA advisory panel rejected the drug. For them, Flibanserin wasn't significantly better than a placebo and its slight benefits didn’t justify its side effects. Now researchers may have stumbled on a more effective means of treating female sexual dysfunction. A clinical trial for another female Viagra accidentally discovered that the best cure for a low libido may be the female mind.
During a clinical study by the Baylor College of Medicine that examined
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2010.