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Pills are not the answer

By Shere Hite

25 January 2003

IN 2001, Viagra earned Pfizer a cool $1.5 billion. Not surprisingly, the company would like to sell its little blue pill to women as well as men, and envious competitors are keen to develop their own Viagra-like products for women.

But there’s a problem. Women do not suffer the same physical problems with sex as men, and you cannot market a drug unless there is an accepted clinical need for it. So what’s a company to do? Answer: invent a condition called “female sexual dysfunction” and persuade experts to claim a whopping 43 per cent of women suffer from it at some time.…

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