Cindy Lange-Kubick: Sex drug ads bring squirms

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Erectile dysfunction commercials pain me.

I don’t want to see the slow dancing, the longing looks, the smiling men with guitars singing Viva Viagra!  — as if a bunch of 14-year-olds in middle-aged bodies had just discovered sex.

I mute the TV, too, because I especially don’t want to hear about a certain side effect containing the words “lasts more than four hours.”

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I’m all for sex and the happiness it brings.

It just gets old seeing Guys Getting Happy with their FDA-approved little helpers. As if their sexual satisfaction were more important than women’s.

But just as there have always been men who couldn’t get it going (for one reason or another), there have always been women who didn’t want to get it on (for one reason or another).

And although I’m not sure why there has never been a drug for women that would allow them to join the lucrative and uplifting legions of Viagra, Cialis and Levitra users, there is now.

Or at least there is one in the pipeline.

It’s being tested in Nebraska, and they’re looking for more volunteers.

The Women’s Clinic of Lincoln is a clinical research site for LibiGel, a testosterone replacement designed to help with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, found on Page 496 of the DSM-IV and in bedrooms across America.

The marketing materials for the study — perhaps realizing the less-than-stimulating official name for the problem — are calling it a “medical research study for women who have lost that loving feeling.”

Which Stephen Swanson, the local doctor in charge of research, thinks has a nice ring to it.

“That’s kind of a good way to put it,” said the OB/Gyn, who remembers the old song by the same name.

Swanson and director of clinical research for the Women’s Clinic, Hannah Hernandez, are excited about the study and what LibiGel might mean for 40 million women.

The topical testosterone is in the third phase of its trials, which means it’s moving along but is still at least five years from making it to the marketplace.

Swanson’s clinic is conducting research on two groups of women, using both the gel and a placebo.

Potential participants are carefully screened to make sure their lack of desire isn’t related to other factors, the pair said. And because they are testing the efficacy of testosterone, only post-menopausal women qualify.

“We’re looking for healthy women,” Hernandez said. “Obviously they have to be suffering from loss of sexual desire.”

Suffering is the key.

The study is for women who want to be doing it — who want to feel desire, not just be desired.

“Many years ago it would be unusual for women to come in and complain,” Swanson said.

Not anymore.

Women of all ages come in wanting to know how to improve their sex lives, the doctor said.

The idea that testosterone will help boost women’s mojo is not new, Swanson said. But now, with research, there will be definitive answers.

And it isn’t the answer, or the only answer. There are plenty of reasons women aren’t getting turned on that have nothing to do with hormones: bad relationships, depression, stress, other pressing problems that need to be dealt with other ways.

But it’s nice to see that the medical community and the pharmaceutical companies see a market out there.

That they recognize women want and deserve good sex every bit as much as men do.

I am a little leery about the commercials though.

One can only hope there aren’t fireworks involved in the filming.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.