Low Sex Drive, poor quality of life?

On January 27 I posted an article by Carolyn Dean MD, ND about medical codes and insurance billing. I'd read the article when it was first published and had a copy of it in my archives. I hope many of you were able to listen to Dr. Dean discuss this issue with Jeff Rense on his program.

I started laughing when I read the following article because I didn't have to get any further than the first sentence to see the focus of the article: A new DSM category and a new CPT billing code. Now all we need to do is wait for some drug company to come along and bring us a new drug that will have so many side effects it will cause some one to suffer terrible side effects.

And then there will be the insipid TV ads to go along with the effort to condition everyone in the baby boomer or younger group to start to believe the answer to sex drive is in their little pill. I wonder if the profit ratio and margins are already calculated.

This picture isn't too much more than a re-run of PMDD so there was an excuse to get you on Prozac or some other SSRI to lead you down the slippery slope of suicide, homicide or osteoporosis.

Where's the beef in this picture? (cynic that I am) Referring to a good whole food diet, and a few vitamins or herbs that will get you straightened out with no long term side effects.

I have to admit when I read this article this article my mind went directly to last night's NPR program awarding George Carlin the Kennedy Center Twain Award and a later story on Petey Greene with a young Howard Stern in the hot seat.

For those of you that don't understand abstract thinking, apparently like the several people who have been verbally attacking me and this blog in the last week or so, this means that it's all in the rhetoric.

And boy do the drug and insurance company script writers have a corner on this market.

Women's low sex drive tied to poor quality of life Wed Feb 4, 2009
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Postmenopausal women who have hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) - a low level of sexual desire -- have a worse health-related quality of life than their counterparts who are happy with their sex lives, according to a new study.

In fact, the researchers say, HSDD can cause in impairments in well-being on par with those seen in chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis and asthma.

HSDD, the "persistent lack of sexual desire causing 'marked stress or interpersonal difficulties,'" is included in the Fourth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists and defines mental illnesses widely accepted by the psychiatric establishment.

But questions remain about whether HSDD is a real problem for women or "represents a disorder that has become 'medicalised' because of its pharmaceutical market potential,'" Dr. Andrea K. Biddle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues write in Value of Health, a journal published by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

One member of Biddle's research team works for Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which also funded the research and provided consultation for the survey. Procter & Gamble makes a testosterone patch, Intrinsa, which is approved for treating HSDD in Europe. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted against approving Intrinsa in December 2004, citing lack of evidence for its long-term safety.

In the current study, Biddle and her team looked at data for 1,189 women who had gone through natural menopause or surgical menopause, in which their ovaries were removed, to test the impact of HSDD on women's health and well-being. All of the women, who ranged in age from 30 to 70 years, were in a stable relationship for at least 3 months.

Among women who underwent natural menopause, 6.6 percent met the criteria for HSDD, while 12.5 percent of women who had surgical menopause met the criteria.

Women considered to have HSDD were less satisfied with their home life and their emotional and physical relationship with their sexual partner, and were also more likely to be depressed, the researchers found.

They were also about twice as likely to have back pain, fatigue, problems with memory, and depression.

The women with HSDD scored lower on several measures of health-related quality of life including mental health, vitality, social function and bodily pain.

Overall, the researchers conclude that their findings "suggest that HSDD represents a significant and clinically relevant problem."

SOURCE: Value in Health, online. Copyright © 2009 Reuters Limited