Women find new help for sexual dysfunction.

Byline: Judy Peres

CHICAGO _ Since the advent of Viagra, men have been flocking to doctors' offices and Internet sites to get help for what once was an unspoken affliction.

Now women want to know "What about us?" And pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to develop products they can sell to the other half of the population.

The result is a new science dedicated to the biology of female sexual dysfunction. Many of the players in this new field are urologists, gynecologists, neurologists and endocrinologists _ unlike the pre-Viagra days, when unglamorous and underfunded research was pursued mainly by sociologists and sex therapists.

The new sex researchers have shown that many problems are due to aging, hormonal imbalance, poor circulation, disease and the medications taken to control those diseases. The physiology of sex has replaced the emphasis on guilt and performance anxiety that stemmed from the 1966 work of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

When the members of the International Society for the Study of Women's Sexual Health held their first meeting in the fall, they heard presentations on topics such as "Reciprocal Regulators of Vaginal Blood Flow" and "Female Androgen Deficiency Syndrome." Not coincidentally, the meeting was funded by grants from Pfizer, Lilly ICOS, Wyeth-Ayerst and other large drug companies.

This nexus has spurred critics to warn that the "medicalization" of women's sexual problems may enrich drug company stockholders and the careers of anointed researchers, but not the majority of women who need help.

That, they say, is because women's sexual complaints are more likely to be caused by ignorance, social conditions,…