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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Attend the hearing, in hopes of accessing a drug that offered “even a modest improvement” in her sex drive. But while the women’s descriptions of the drug made it sound great, the data tell a different story.In clinical trials testing its effectiveness, flibanserin has either failed or barely passed. Only about 10-12 percent of women in trials benefitted from taking the drug. And even those showing “a modest improvement” in libido were exposed to the drug’s serious side effects, including sudden drops in blood pressure and loss of consciousness. One woman even suffered a concussion when she fainted during a trial.Trials studying flibanserin’s effect while taken with other drugs were especially troubling. Paired with fluconazole, a medication used to treat vaginal yeast infections, flibanserin caused such severe problems that the study had to be stopped early. And the trial studying flibanserin’s interaction with alcohol was so small (25 people, including just two women), we can’t draw any conclusions from the results. Unlike Viagra, flibanserin is a daily pill, so understanding its interaction with alcohol is vital.History should convince us all to be cautious about new drug treatments marketed for women’s health. There are numerous cases of over-medication, over-diagnosis and over-treatment. Women get hurt when companies create and exaggerate conditions to promote use of their drugs. In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies began marketing drugs for a condition called osteopenia, which they defined as “lower than normal” bone density. In reality, it was a ploy to justify prescribing bisphosphonate drugs — used to treat the very real condition of osteoporosis — to millions of healthy women. A small number who took these drugs for osteopenia reported sudden breaks in their upper leg bone, suggesting a treatment that was supposed to prevent fractures could cause them.In another case, pharmaceutical companies persuaded doctors to prescribe hormones to millions of healthy women to treat what they called “postmenopausal estrogen deficiency.” But when researchers tested these hormone “replacement” therapies in 2002, the evidence didn’t support the companies’ claims that the treatments would protect women from heart disease and cognitive decline. Instead, the treatment increased their risk
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