Why Women's Desire Disappears After 40 (And the Drug That Brings It Back) | Cindy Eckert | #168

**Cindy Eckert** (0:00)
There's a reward center of your brain that drives sex, your appetite for sex. And for many of us, that balance goes off kilter at some point.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:09)
Hello, Dr Vonda listeners. I am talking to one of my favorite people right now. Cindy Eckert has launched one of the most miraculous drugs for women's health and sexuality.

**Cindy Eckert** (0:22)
The first data on a slide that showed differences in brain scan imaging of women with low libido versus women who didn't have it. And the first thing I did was to talk to women who had it. Here's what I heard from them over and over and over again, that they were consistently medically gaslit, that they were told it's all in your head. This is normal. Wear sexier lingerie. Anything other than, do you know, this could also just be your biology betraying you.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:49)
This has not been an easy journey from conception of idea through the FDA into the hands of clinicians and therefore women. But you did it.

**Cindy Eckert** (0:58)
It wasn't the science that was hard. It's what the science had to survive. And what it had to survive was cultural resistance to the idea that women could have a medication for their libido, that they could have a complete agency over their pleasure.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:12)
It's a freedom that we deserve to have, right?

**Cindy Eckert** (1:14)
It is absolutely.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:19)
I just want to take the time to thank you all for being here with us at The Dr Vonda Podcast. You are smart. You are curious. You are generous. And you have turned this sleepy podcast into consistently ranking in the top five, six, seven of all medicine podcasts across the world. And we are currently in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts across the world. And I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing. With everybody you love, with everybody who needs to hear our guests. And I want you to subscribe. Every single month, more than 135,000 people listen to this podcast. And we have educated millions of people over time.
I want you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I want you to follow this podcast on all the platforms. And if you want to see the videos, you need to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thanks for being here on The Dr Vonda Podcast. The best is yet to come. Hello, Dr Vonda listeners. I am talking to one of my favorite people right now. Cindy Eckert is a entrepreneur of the grandest scale. She is currently the founder and CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals and has launched one of the most miraculous drugs for women's health and sexuality. And there's only two in the whole category. So I am really excited that she's here. Did you know what happened this year? A movie was made about her journey because it has been a journey that most people will have abandoned, Cindy, but not you, because it was just so important. And what I love seeing you do between the launch, the new application of Addy, the movie, is you are educating in the most shocking way. Like, did you know that that movie about the girl with the ice came out before approval? I can't even remember her name. Elsa came out before. Can you imagine? And this phone is how you let me participate in the launch of Addy for Postmenopausal Women. So, thank you.
Thank you so much for being here. I love this core quote that we dug up about you, where you said, we have pushed the science to speak louder than the stigma that surrounds.
This has not been an easy journey from conception of idea through the FDA into the hands of clinicians and therefore women, but you did it because women's health is that important.
What have you heard from the thousands of women that you receive messages from about how their female sexual health has been discussed with them? The euphemisms, the hoo-hoo and the ha-ha, and it's all in your head. I mean, tell us the story of the women that you listened to.

**Cindy Eckert** (4:28)
I'll tell you at the very beginning. So when I first saw the first data on a slide that showed differences in brain scan imaging of women with low libido or HSDD versus women who didn't have it, lightning struck me. And the first thing I did was went to talk to women who had it. And so here's what I heard from them over and over and over again, that they were consistently medically gaslit, that they were told it's all in your head, this is normal, do better, take a bubble bath, wear sexier lingerie, anything other than, do you know, this could also just be your biology betraying you. But what was so profound to me is when I first, like I spent a year before I did this, no one, I don't know that people really clock this in the timeline. I was running this company for Men's Sexual Health. I spent a year just talking to women before I did this. And what struck me was how similar their stories were. And they were different ages, they were menopausal, they were pre-menopausal, they were, some of them married for a long time, recently married, divorced. Every version, right, none of those women had the exact same story other than their experience with HSD.