Get ready, women. The first drug to “cure” female sexual dysfunction, flibanserin, may be coming on the market within a couple of years or so.

And you thought all those Viva Viagra commercials on TV were annoying.

Last week, the German pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingelheim reported the findings of large-scale clinical trials of flibanserin. The company said that women with “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (HSDD) who took 100 mg daily of the drug for six months experienced 0.8 more “sexually satisfying events” each month, on average, than women with HSDD who took a placebo.

Specifically, the women on flibanserin reported an increase from 2.8 to 4.5 sexually satisfying events (not necessarily orgasms, however) each month compared to 3.7 in the placebo group.

According to Boehringer, that’s a statistically significant result — and a medical breakthrough for women "suffering from a lack of sexual desire."

Ho-hum significance?
Women health activists (and many scientists of both genders) are less impressed. Writes Christine Ottery in the British Guardian newspaper:

And, as one clinical psychologist told New Scientist magazine, it’s “very debatable” whether Boehringer’s results represent any kind of improvement for women, noting that “[a]n effect that’s statistically significant may not be clinically meaningful.”

A pseudo-disease?
Of course, the bigger issue is the whole controversy swirling around the definition and causes of female sexual dysfuntion (FSD) and HSDD (considered the most common form of FSD) — and whether, as Boehringer and others claim, one in 10 women suffer from it. (The 1999 U.S. study that sort of launched this whole debate concluded that 43 percent of American women experience FSD at some point in their lives.)

Notes Ottery:

As reported in Time magazine, some women health activists are highly skeptical of all the hoopla around flibanserin and other attempts to find pharmaceutical solutions to low libido in women:

A disempowering message
The bitter irony of the FSD controversy, says the Guardian's Ottery, is "the disempowering message that women who are having sexual problems are all ill."

For women, one of the primary causes of loss of sexual desire is "relationship issues," she says, "so feeling empowered to communicate what you want could be crucial in resolving this. Nevertheless, some women will want a magic bullet solution to their sex life problems. It is a tempting idea in our time-poor lives to pop a pill and not take the time to work out the root cause of issues and address them."

As I said, get ready for more annoying commercials.