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North Carolina pain-specialist Dr. Stuart Meloy is now looking for more female volunteers to test his device, which involves electrodes being inserted into the spinal column.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he says he hasn't been overwhelmed by the response. Nonetheless, Dr. Meloy believes his research will make a valuable contribution to overcoming a state which he says is shared by a third of women, an inability to climax.

Mark Tamhane reports.

MARK TAMHANE: It's been dubbed the 'Orgasmatron', but Pain specialist Stuart Meloy claims no credit for the title.

STUART MELOY: Woody Allen is the man who coined that term. I haven't really assigned it myself, but people do call it that. The more medical terminology that I use is neurally augmented sexual function, or NASA for short.

MARK TAMHANE: Dr. Meloy says the device he's come up with involves a simple modification to a spinal cord stimulator.

STUART MELOY: A spinal chord stimulator is kind of like a pacemaker in that there's a set of electrodes that you implant in a particular part of the body and they're connected to a generator that makes electrical impulses for one reason or another.

In this case, the electrodes go in the spinal canal in a space called the epidural space, which is fairly familiar to a lot of women, simply because that's the same place that the catheter for anaesthetic for labour is put.

But we actually look at the electrode using… while it's inside the spinal canal and we move it back and forth in order to get different effects. Basically, you have remote control, you can turn it on and off, you can turn it up and down, you can change the electrical characteristic of the current and that changes the sensation that you feel.

MARK TAMHANE: Like all great inventions, Dr. Meloy's orgasm-inducing device, came about by accident.

STUART MELOY: I was originally using this as a patient in order to treat pain and then I produced this other result and then I got this idea that it would make a therapy for a different problem.

MARK TAMHANE: What did she tell you about her experience when you used this machine on her?

STUART MELOY: She was kind of surprised, as you might imagine and I was surprised too, but her comment was, you're going to have to teach my husband that.

MARK TAMHANE: Dr. Meloy says he repeated the experiment with a second woman who had enjoyed a healthy sex life but who hadn't been able to have an orgasm in four years.

STUART MELOY: And with the device in place she was able to climax every time she attempted it.

MARK TAMHANE: Did she find using the device, it might have robbed the spontaneity of the moment if you like?

STUART MELOY: It didn't seem to be a problem.

MARK TAMHANE: Stuart Meloy says he's had difficulty in finding female volunteers for an extended clinical trial of his device, even though it's been sanctioned by the US Food and Drug Administration.

He admits having a device sutured into your spinal cord, with a battery pack inserted under your skin isn't for everyone.

STUART MELOY: It's not something to do on a lark, but I think on a larger scale, this is an exceptionally common problem. I mean, we're talking about a third of adult women suffering from this kind of problem, yet as a society as a whole we're reluctant to discuss sex, so I think it's only when you get a burst of attention like this that you can communicate effectively.

Sexuality is such an enormous part of the human experience, and yet apparently it's a problem for a lot of people. I think if I can contribute to well being in terms of leading a more well rounded satisfied life for a lot of people, then I would have done good in this world.

HAMISH ROBERTSON: That was pain specialist Dr Stuart Melloy, speaking from his home near Winston-Salem in North Carolina.