What is impotence?
This is the general term to capture all the different things that can go wrong in the process of producing children. This includes erectile dysfunction. If you cannot achieve an erection hard enough to penetrate your partner or the erection collapses before you are ready to ejaculate, no children will appear.
What causes erectile dysfunction?
The causes fall into three separate classes. First, you may have been injured or a disease may have damaged the blood vessels, muscles or nerve endings essential to producing an erection. Second, you may be depressed or have lost your sex drive for some psychological reason. Third, the erectile dysfunction may be a side effect to one of the drugs you are taking.
How effective can Viagra be?
If you have been seriously injured or there’s physical damage, no drugs are likely to help. Viagra is not a cure for any of the underlying causes of erectile dysfunction. All it can do is enable an erection to form if you have the physical capacity. Second, if you do not find the situation sexually stimulating, your body is not going to react. An erection only forms when the mind and body work together. If you are too depressed, no erectile dysfunction drug is going to work. The only solution is to treat the depression. As your mood improves, your libido will return and interest in sex will reappear.
Finally, if the erectile dysfunction is caused by other drugs, your doctor will have to adjust the dosages or change to alternative drugs to restore your sexual power. In most cases, these side effects do not last long once you have reduce the amount of active drug in your bloodstream.
What is the most common physical cause of erectile dysfunction?
Being able to form an erection depends on the ability of your penile artery to dilate. If you have a high level of cholesterol in your bloodstream, deposits build up on the walls of your blood vessels. As these slowly harden, you lose the ability to expand and contract those vessels and erectile dysfunction starts.
This is called atherosclerosis and, untreated, it will cause high blood pressure and heart disease. For this reason, when you go see your doctor about erectile dysfunction, you will be treated as if you were already a heart patient until tests prove you are not at risk. The hope is that, by diagnosing the problem early, preventative treatment will keep you healthy into your golden years. In the short-term, Viagra will keep you sexually active while the treatment for atherosclerosis continues. In the best cases, your erections return naturally.
What is the most common psychological cause of erectile dysfunction?
This is performance anxiety when, literally, you worry yourself into failure. This is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy. As your self-confidence falls, you begin avoidance, i.e. to find excuses not to try sexual activity. The greater your reluctance to try, the less sexually stimulating the circumstances and so the more likely there will be no erection. Viagra can break this vicious cycle, restore confidence and return your sexual power.
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