Call him doctor 'Orgasmatron'

Dr. Stuart Meloy never set out to study orgasms. It was an accident.

He was in the operating room one day in 1998, implanting electrodes into a patient's spine to treat her chronic leg pain. (The electrodes are connected to a device that fires impulses to the brain to block pain signals.) But when he turned on the power, "the patient suddenly let out something between a shriek and moan," says Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in North Carolina.

Asked what was wrong, she replied, "You'll have to teach my husband how to do that."

Meloy moved the electrodes until he found the correct, pain-numbing position on the spine. "I went home, had a funny story to tell my wife," he says.

He almost left it at that.

But the next day, he told the story to some colleagues, and a gynecologist commented that one-third of his patients complain of orgasm dysfunction.

Might this, Meloy mused, potentially help such people?

He started a formal pilot study of the device, which is approved for use in treating bladder and pain problems, implanting it in the spines of 11 women, some of whom had never had an orgasm. The women, who were instructed to keep a record of all their sexual experiences, were allowed to use the device for nine days adlibitum.

Meloy's study, published in 2006 in the journal Neuromodulation, reported that 10 out of 11 of the patients felt pleasurable stimulation from the device, including increased vaginal lubrication. Five of the women had previously lost their ability to have orgasms; four regained it with the device. (The fifth never used her device during the nine-day trial because of work stress, she said.)

None of the five women who had never had an orgasm was able to experience one with the device, however. "They said it was pleasurable, but it wasn't sending them over the edge," Meloy says.

The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron after the orgasm-inducing cylinder in Woody Allen's 1973 movie "Sleeper" -- rests on the skin just above the belt line. Two electrodes snake into the space between the vertebrae and the spinal cord. A video-game-like remote control allows women (or their partners) to turn electrical pulses on and off and fiddle with timing and intensity.

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