January 19th, 2010 by admin

The power of words must never be underestimated. Pick the right word and suddenly your brand name is on everyone’s lips. Pick the wrong word and no-one ever hears of you or, if they do hear the word, the reaction is amusement or rejection. So get into the time machine and let’s go back to the 1990’s. This is before Pfizer launched the famous little blue pill in 1998. A group of people are sitting round a table in a backroom trying to think up the best way of describing this new wonder drug. How were they going to market something of such a sensitive nature. No-one liked to talk about erections and sexual problems in public. It was just too embarrassing. The culture was way behind the technology to bring a cure. They decided the key problem was the use of the word “impotence”. It had far too many negative vibes attached to it. So, after hours of fruitless labor, they finally decided to describe the medical problem as “erectile dysfunction”. This also had the advantage of being easily contracted to ED which was definitely not threatening. The rest, as they say, is history. The pill was launched with a major fanfare and no-one minded talking about erectile dysfunction.

Welcome back to a modern debate on whether loss of libido in women is a medical problem to be cured. The word most often used to describe the condition is “frigidity”. This has an insulting meaning. It blames women for not finding men sexually attractive. The new manufacturer has decided to use the term “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (HSDD). When this was first announced to the world, there was a scathing reply in the British Medical Journal accusing the manufacturer of inventing a disease to convince gullible women they needed to buy medicine. Put another way, this drug is aimed at a US market estimated to be worth more than the erectile dysfunction market. There are millions of women waiting for what’s already being called the “desire pill”. Read the rest of this entry »