But this is what it means to be a skeptic

– doing your research and understanding that an industry can

be suspect and immoral without necessarily being pure evil.

As an outspoken skeptic with a large

audience and a keen interest in not dying of horrific diseases, I’m

often accused of being in the pocket of “Big Pharma,” the shady

multinational conglomerate of drug companies that makes money by poisoning

our water supply and injecting children with heroin and thumbtacks.

Critics of Big Pharma rush to comment

whenever I post a video describing the relative safety of vaccines,

the effectiveness of achieving herd immunity, or the underhanded tactics

of frauds like Andrew Wakefield. I am told that I must be cashing checks

to defend products produced by pharmaceutical companies, since there

is so much anecdotal evidence that they are evil.

When I first started getting comments

like that, I had to laugh – back in 2003, I worked for a progressive

activist organization in Seattle that was fighting the pharmaceutical

industry in the hopes that Medicare could be reformed to include coverage

for prescription medication.

When Medicare was enacted in 1965,

prescription drugs weren’t very expensive and so it wasn’t a great

burden for the elderly to pay full price for their medicine. A few decades

later, the costs skyrocketed in the US with the pharmaceutical companies’

newly discovered power of marketing directly to the consumer: “Be sure to ask your doctor how Fungallipitox

can work for you.” I knew many seniors in the area who took buses

a few hours north to Canada, where their inhalers cost $20 per month

instead of $200.

My organization and others like it

eventually found a bit of success fighting the extraordinarily powerful

pharmaceutical lobby (

tied with the financial lobby as the US’s largest), and in 2006 a prescription drug benefit

was added to Medicare. Unfortunately, there are still gaps that leave

many seniors paying a large portion of their income to keep themselves

alive.

But this is what it means to be a skeptic

– doing your research and understanding that an industry can

be suspect and immoral without necessarily being pure evil. I know that

pharmaceutical companies play dirty, but I also know that vaccines save

lives.

All of which brings us to sex, and

whether or not women are having enough of it. I know, way to bury the

lede, right?

Female sexual arousal disorder is a

hot new area of interest for pharmaceutical companies, who, you may

recall, recently solved all of mankind’s problems by inventing Viagra.

Viagra works by increasing blood flow to the genitals, thus curing erectile

dysfunction, a disorder coined by Pfizer. Interestingly, it works the

exact same way in women.

The problem that pharmaceutical companies

face is that women don’t necessarily seem to react the same way to

Viagra. Some feel their sexual problems are fixed, and others feel no

difference. Women and their bodies, as you may know, are grand mysteries.

Like unicorns. And for some reason, simply stimulating their genitals

is not necessarily a guaranteed way to get them interested in having

intercourse. “I’ve baked this lovely cake and set it in front of

the unicorn, but the unicorn isn’t eating. Why is the unicorn not

eating?”

“Perhaps we can invent a pill that

will make the unicorn want the cake?”

“Yes!”

And so it was that the pharmaceutical

companies created a pill: Flibanserin (sexy!), which directly affects

the brain to trigger sexual desire.

With Viagra, the data showed that it

could drastically improve the sex lives of men, and so it is difficult

to fault drug companies for coining a phrase, tutoring doctors, and

marketing their cure to the general public. In the case of female sexual

arousal disorder, though, things are a bit more nuanced.

Dr. Petra Boynton recently

spoke publicly about being offered £250 by a pharmaceutical

company to sign her name to a pre-written paper that would tell doctors

how many women suffer from arousal disorder. That same company offered

her £1000 to attend sessions where she would hear more about the disorder

before being encouraged to go tell her students, doctors, and the media

about the issue. All of this was done before clinical trial data was

made available.

She refused. She believes that the

data supporting the safety and efficacy of these medications is unconvincing,

noting that they perform only slightly better than placebo and they

are never compared to alternative psychosexual therapies.

Dr. Ben Goldacre is similarly unconvinced.

He also points out that much of the data on female sexual arousal disorder

is suspect – for instance, one of the most cited papers on the

prevalence of the disorder claims that 43% of women have it. This is

based on a three-question survey that was sent out to 1749 women; an

answer of “yes” to just one question is all that is needed

for that woman to be labeled with the disorder. One of the paper’s authors later admitted

that he held a paid advisory position with Pfizer.

It’s difficult for me, as a pro-sex

feminist skeptic, to argue against a medical treatment that might improve

the sex lives of women. It would be wonderful for pharmaceutical companies

to once again coin a new disorder, and in doing so open up conversation

about it. Ideally, this would encourage women to feel more comfortable

opening up more about their sexual health problems, and researchers

would commit more time and resources to studying these problems and

putting them into context. Is the woman under stress? Is she unfamiliar

with her body? Is her partner unwilling or unable to satisfy her? Or

is she having a biological problem?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem

to be the path we’re on. Instead of exploring those questions and

encouraging sex education, pharmaceutical companies’ marketing

departments are selling a magical cure-all pill that likely won’t

cure anything at all in the women they are targeting. It’s classic

Big Pharma: questionable trial results, paid opinion leaders educating

doctors, marketing departments guiding research, and other underhanded,

non-science-based tactics. As skeptics, we should speak out against

this behavior when it is uncovered, and it will only strengthen our

position when we are defending the Big Pharma products that are actually

saving lives.