Placebo Pill Gives Boost to Some Women's Sex Drive

[HuckleB]

Source: MSN

About one-third of women given a placebo pill to treat a low libido reported improvements in their sex lives, a finding researchers say is evidence of the powerful and somewhat mysterious mind-body connection surrounding arousal and desire.

After drugs like Viagra and Cialis revolutionized the treatment of male sexual dysfunction in the late 1990s, a flurry of clinical trials were conducted in women in the hopes that the drugs could do the same to revive a woman's flagging sex drive.

The drugs flopped in women. But recently, researchers went back and looked at the old data on Cialis and found that not only did about 35 percent of women given the placebo pill experience significant improvement in psychological aspects of sex such as desire, many reported improvements in the physical aspects of arousal, including better lubrication, more frequent orgasms or more easily attainable orgasms, according to the study.

"Everything across the board improved in some women," said study author Andrea Bradford, a post-doctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Read more: http://health.msn.com/health-topics/sexual-health/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100264059

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Now this IS very interesting. No?

[Ian David]

1. The standard placebo rate has always been about 1/3. n/t

[louis-t]

2. Just goes to show how much of libido is mental.

[classof56]

3. I once heard the French have a saying:

There are no frigid women, only clumsy men.

Off topic, I know, but kinda interesting...

[Dorian Gray]

4. My guess

Not based on double blind studies, is that libido issues in women is often psychological. For instance, I know a few women who feel guilty about their sex drive, so they sort of suppress it. If they believe a pill gives them desire, it sort of takes away the onus from THEM being horny. Thus, freedom to behave in a more sexual way.

I'm sure that there are other issues at play, as well, but I wouldn't be surprised in many cases that it is a purely psychological effect.

[evirus]

5. wrong wrong and wrong

this isn't a study that shows evidence for some mystical "mind-body connection" its a study that shows that either low libido is do to factors easily definable as stress in general or just in the sample that was tested.