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ScribeMedia.org

The creation and promotion of “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD) is a textbook case of disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry and by other agents of medicalization, such as health and science journalists, healthcare professionals, public relations and advertising firms, contract research organizations, and others in the “medicalization industry.” Whether one relies on Lynn Payer's original definition of disease mongering (“trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill” [1]), her checklist (Box 1), or the analysis of our pill-popping society that was recently offered by Greg Critser [2], the sequence of events and cast of participants involved in FSD matches the classic disease-mongering tactics [1,2].