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Discuss Heart Health with Your Doctor to Combat ED

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Doctor using a stethoscope on a male patient.
Doctors routinely check heart rhythms during your annual checkup, but there’s more to heart health than that.

To get the most from your annual checkup at the doctor’s office, you and your physician need to address heart health, including its current state and all the steps you can take to keep it healthy.

Such discussions are even more critical for men who are experiencing erection problems, even those that are only intermittent and not yet part of a persistent pattern.

In an interview with MedicalDaily.com, Michael Eisenberg, M.D., shares the advice he gives to men concerned about erection problems. “I always tell them, ‘You know, anything that is good for your heart is going to be good for your penis.’” Eisenberg, director of Male Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, points out that eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and maintaining a healthy body weight are all steps that support both heart health and erectile function.

ED Is Mostly a Blood-Flow Problem

The single biggest cause of erectile dysfunction, insufficient blood flow to the penis accounts for roughly 80% of all ED diagnoses. The blood vessels that supply the penis are part of a network of blood vessels that supply every organ in your body with the oxygen-enriched blood the body needs to function properly.

Because the blood vessels that supply the penis are considerably smaller than those that carry blood to the heart and brain, symptoms of ED are likely to surface well before diminished blood flow seriously affects those larger organs.

Thus, ED symptoms serve as an early warning system of more serious cardiovascular health problems that could follow if action isn’t taken to stabilize and hopefully improve blood flow.

Take Early Action to Avoid Problems

In the best of all possible worlds, you might be able to avoid ED as well as more serious heart health issues if you work closely with your doctor to develop a program designed to promote healthy cardiovascular function. As indicated earlier, this might well require some changes in lifestyle. While diet, exercise, and weight control provide the foundation for a heart-healthy lifestyle, you may also need to get rid of some habits, such as smoking, that poses a threat to robust cardiovascular function.

For those men who are already experiencing some erection problems, lifestyle modification might not be enough to turn things around. In such cases, your doctor can prescribe Viagra or another one of the oral ED drugs to help give you the added boost you need to get and keep an erection suitable for intercourse. If you are successful in adopting — and adhering to — a healthy lifestyle, you might find over time that you’ve regained erectile function on your own and may no longer need the extra help Viagra provides.

If you’re a Viagra user and would like to enjoy the convenience of online ordering, you should check out all that longtime online facilitator eDrugstore.com has to offer. Part of the Secure Medical family of online drugstores, eDrugstore offers a full range of oral ED medications, as well as a limited selection of other lifestyle drugs. To learn more about its services and some of its free extras, pay a visit to eDrugstore’s Erectile Dysfunction page.

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