Adopt a healthy lifestyle to prevent erectile dysfunction for as long as you can. That’s because Viagra and the other ED medications known as PDE5 inhibitors may only be effective for about five years.
Men who believe that erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra guarantee they will be able to perform sexually indefinitely are in for a big shock. Mayo Clinic urologist Tobias Kohler, M.D., in a recent Mayo Clinic Radio interview said that these medications are unlikely to be very effective after they’ve been taken for five years or so.
And it’s not that the medications themselves have ceased to work but rather that the state of the patient’s ED has worsened to the point where more drastic treatments are needed to enable him to get and keep an erection suitable for intercourse.
Lifestyle Modifications
The best way to stave off ED is through lifestyle modification. If you’ve been eating too much fast food and exercising infrequently, your risk for developing erection problems is far higher than if you were eating a healthy diet and engaging in a regular regimen of physical activity. Quitting smoking, losing weight, and working with your doctor to control underlying medical conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure can go a long way toward holding ED at bay.
Kohler points out that ED is an early warning sign that more serious health problems lie ahead unless you change your ways. The arteries that supply blood to the penis, he notes, are about 2 millimeters in diameter, only half the size of those that supply the heart. So it’s only natural that early signs of cardiovascular disease would show up in the penis before they did in the heart. He likens erection problems to the “canary in the coal mine” that warned of impending disaster.
ED Drugs Aren’t Effective Forever
If, however, you have failed to prevent the onset of erection problems in the first place, you’ll only be able to overcome ED symptoms for about five years with the help of the oral ED drugs known as PDE5 inhibitors. These include Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Staxyn, and Stendra, as well as the generic equivalents of Viagra (sildenafil citrate), Cialis (tadalafil), and Levitra (vardenafil hydrochloride).
When the ED drugs no longer do the job, according to Kohler, the next form of treatment is likely to be penile injection therapy, which involves the infection of a vasodilating drug such as alprostadil directly into the shaft of the penis. While the procedure may seem daunting, Kohler says it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Next Step: Surgery
And should that form of treatment eventually become ineffective, surgical intervention is likely to be the next step. This usually involves the placement within the penis of dual-chambered flexible tubing that can be made rigid by manually (or automatically) pumping saline fluid from a subdermal reservoir into it. When sexual activity has been completed, the fluid can be pumped back out of the penile tubing and into the reservoir. If a healthy lifestyle has failed to stave off your symptoms of ED, the first line of treatment is Viagra or another of the ED medications. And ordering these medications from longtime online facilitator eDrugstore.com can often save you time and money. To learn more, visit eDrugstore’s Erectile Dysfunction page.
