“Now we’re sticking needles into different parts of the brain,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the Boston urologist who founded the multidisciplinary group. “Whatever pharmaceuticals are proven to help … most likely will work in the central nervous system.”
Clinicians, frustrated by the slow pace of sexual science, want effective treatments for patients brave enough to seek help–a small minority.
Although social scientists have been studying women’s sexuality for decades, medical science did not become interested until the advent of Viagra in the late 1990s raised the possibility that female sexual problems might be treated by medication.
Viagra, which treats erectile dysfunction by increasing blood flow to the genitals, does not appear to work in women.
In fact, no drug has been approved in the U.S. for the disorder doctors call female sexual dysfunction. That may be understandable, given that experts aren’t sure what female sexual dysfunction is–or even if it exists.
The main session on Saturday morning was devoted to the topic, “What Is Sexual Desire and How Do We Know?”
Dr. Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist from Case Western Reserve University, argued that sexual desire feels a lot like sexual arousal, even though diagnostic guidelines distinguish between hypoactive sexual-desire disorder and female sexual-arousal disorder — and researchers recruit patients suffering from one or the other for separate clinical trials of new drugs.
“Science must measure,” Levine said, “so we measure how many times the patient said she had sexual thoughts or desired sex in the last four weeks. But we don’t know what we’re measuring.”
To some members of the society, fearing that women’s sexual complaints are being turned into medical illnesses for the convenience of doctors and the economic benefit of Big Pharma, that admission was a breath of fresh air.
“I think it’s progress that we can spend two hours in this performance-driven society admitting that maybe we don’t know what we’re talking about,” said Ellen Laan, a psychophysiologist from the University of Amsterdam.
Michael Sand, a sexologist who works in Germany, agreed.
“We don’t understand normative, healthy sexuality well enough to make judgments about what’s dysfunctional.”
Since the 1960s, researchers have operated under a variation of the simple model proposed by William Masters and Virginia Johnson that says the human sexual response starts with desire, progresses through excitement or arousal and ends with orgasm. But experts argued that notion might reflect the experience of men more than women, many of whom don’t see orgasm as a goal.
In recent years the field has moved toward a more complicated model based on the observation that many women go into a sexual encounter without being in the mood–perhaps they’re seeking intimacy or hoping to please their partner–and may not really want sex until after they become aroused.
But it wasn’t until very recently that anyone thought to test those theories by asking women.
Sand, who was awarded a prize for his innovative research, found that 57 percent of women felt a straightforward model best described their sexual experience. The 29 percent who endorsed the more complicated model were more likely to have sexual problems.
That made sense, Sand said, because Masters and Johnson recruited couples who liked sex a lot, while the more complicated model was based on the experiences of women with sexual complaints.
`We need to go back to the drawing board and come up with models that explain why some women have different sexual experiences, find out which models fit which women, so we can serve women more effectively when they have sexual concerns,” Sand said.
More than 300 researchers, physicians and therapists attended the four-day conference, which ended Sunday. Among other papers presented:
- Women who were physically active had better orgasms and higher overall satisfaction with sex than their inactive peers, according to a study of 65 women in Austin,Texas. But higher scores on a standard measure of sexual function did not seem to be related to cardio-respiratory level or to body mass index.
- A small group of postmenopausal women who took a single dose of an experimental nasal spray were more excited and had more sex in the next 24 hours than a comparable group who got a placebo. Larger studies of the drug, known as PT-141 or bremelanotide, are ongoing.
- A common antidepressant, bupropion, improved sexual function as well as sleep disturbances, weight gain and other menopausal symptoms in a small, preliminary study from the University of Virginia.
[Press Release] - While mainstream America toiled through three long hours of the Academy Awards, the good folks over at 
ORLANDO [Chicago Tribune] – To get an idea of just how much remains unknown about an area that directly affects most people’s lives, you need to drop in on the International Society for the Study of Women ’s Sexual Health.
CHATSWORTH, Calif. - Tonight’s broadcast of ABC’s newsmagazine program “Nightline” will kick off with a segment shot during the 2007 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.