Room 517-C | Women's Sexual Response: Biopsychosocial Perspectives Thursday, July 14, 2005 Time: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM |
Proctor & Gamble's Testosterone Patch for Women: A Case Study in the Medicalization of Sexuality.
Tiefer, Leonore*,1, 1 NYU School of Medicine; Campaign for a New View of Women's Sexual Problems, New York, NY, USA
ABSTRACT- Over the last ten years, media attention and scientific research on women's sexual life have increasingly emphasized performance norms for sexual adequacy (e.g. routine and consistent sexual desire, arousal and orgasm), physical causes of sexual inadequacy (e.g., hormonal and genital blood-flow deficiencies), the central role of physicians in helping women with sexual problems, and the role of drugs and other medical interventions in treatment. We call this the medicalization of women's sexuality. This medicalization has been made possible by a number of social, economic and professional trends, and one way to tell the story is in terms of individual case studies. Procter & Gamble (P&G), a major Fortune 500 corporation with $55 billion/year sales in domestic cleaning, food, and cosmetic products, has a small pharmaceutical division. In the late 1990s, along iwth other companies, P&G began to study the possibilities of treating a new condition, "female sexual dysfunction," wtih synthetic androgenic hormones. They chose a transdermal patch technology (other compaines are going with gels, creams, nasal sprays, and pills). In 2000, the FDA provided guidelines on appropriate clinical trial endpoints and study groups. P&G submitted the data on their testosterone patch product (named "Intrinsa") to the FDA in June, 2004, but after it was unanimously rejected on safety grounds by an FDA advisory committee early in December, 2004, P&G withdrew its application. However, In January, 2005, P&G submitted its data to the European Medicines Agency, the EU counterpart of the FDA. In this presentation, I want to describe the invention and promotion of the new medical "female sexual dysfunction" using the P&G story as a case study. "Intrinsa" offers us an example of sexual social construction in action and allows us to observe the active roles played by consumers, sexologists, the pharmaceutical industry, physicians, insurance payers, government agencies, public relations companies, and many different kinds of media. Any atttempt to describe the biopychosocial perspectives of women's sexual lives must take the current medicalization into account, in terms of its effects on the policy, media, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels.
Key words: women