Drugmakers and medical professionals rely heavily on patients’ subjective judgments to evaluate the efficacy and quality of the erectile dysfunction medications they take. To that end, questionnaires such as the Quality of Erection Questionnaire, or QEQ, have been developed.
Quantifying the effectiveness of any medication designed to treat erection problems can be difficult. That’s because the researchers don’t typically follow the patient into the bedroom to determine how the medication worked.
Also, in the case of sexual performance, defining what is “effective” can be a subjective process. So, how is it that doctors and patients know if the erectile dysfunction medication is working — or not?
Gauging ED Drug Efficacy
To overcome such obstacles, researchers rely heavily upon questionnaires to determine the success of the medication. Scientists have come up with a few different measurement tools to help quantify the results of taking ED medications such as Viagra. These tools include the six-question Quality of Erection Questionnaire (QEQ), which seeks to quantify the patient’s sense of erection, “hardness, onset, and duration.” Created by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the multiple-choice questions include the patient’s personal perceptions of whether they had:
- erections hard enough for penetration of their partner
- the ability to maintain an erection long enough to complete intercourse
- the ability to stay hard for an adequate length of time
- a good amount of time when they were able to stay erect during intercourse
- satisfaction related to the hardness of their erection
- satisfaction related to the overall quality of the erection
While these are subjective assessments that are reliant on the man’s own evaluation of the drug’s performance, thus far they have been the standard measurement of erectile dysfunction medications such as Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra.
If you use Viagra or another ED drug to relieve your symptoms of erectile dysfunction, you might want to consider the convenience of ordering the drug from a trustworthy online facilitator such as eDrugstore.com. In business since the late 1990s, eDrugstore is based in Tempe, Arizona, and sells only FDA-approved medications that are dispensed exclusively by licensed U.S. pharmacists. To learn more, visit eDrugstore’s Erectile Dysfunction page.
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