5 Reasons Why You Should Never Use ED Drugs
(Written by Eric Bradley)
A quick note before we get started…
This article on erectile dysfunction medication dangers is very detailed, so I’m going list the key points right here at the top of the page.
Here we go…
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- These drugs fail to address the root cause of your problem.
- They can cause hearing and vision loss (rare, but it happens).
- They can cause numerous other side effects, including death.
- They also increase cortisol levels (very bad for testosterone)
- ED medications do nothing for sex drive…they just give you the wood.
One final thing…
If you’d like to learn how to get wood and sex drive both at the same time, download this.
Now here’s Eric…
Before we start discussing the 5 Erectile Dysfunction Medication Dangers, I want to raise a very important point…
Absolutely none of these drugs can cure erectile dysfunction. All they do is treat the primary symptom, namely the inability to develop and maintain a healthy erection.
Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra all do their work by messing around with naturally occurring enzymes in your body. Whenever you interfere in your body’s natural processes, you can put your health at risk.
This is actually the key difference between health supplements and pharmaceutical drugs. Health supplements do just that – supplement the body’s own natural processes to boost their efficiency and promote optimal health.
Pharmaceutical drugs, on the other hand, interfere in natural processes and temporarily alter the internal environment.
Even though these drugs only treat the symptoms superficially and do nothing to cure the condition, erectile dysfunction is curable. Would you rather just keep treating the symptoms for the rest of your life, or to be completely cured and have a normal, healthily functioning body?
Now let’s look at those 5 reasons why erectile dysfunction medications usually do more harm than good.
Reason 1: ED Drugs Have No Positive Effect On Libido
Many people fail to recognize that sexual arousal and erectile function are not mutually interdependent. In other words, you can have sexual desire without an erection and you can have an erection without sexual desire.
Similarly, a woman can feel sexual desire without producing vaginal lubrication, and can also experience vaginal lubrication in the absence of sexual desire.
Therefore it is a mistake to believe that just because you have some lead in your pencil it will automatically mean you will feel the inclination to write anything with it, nor that you will write anything meaningful.
As mentioned above, erectile dysfunction medications such as Viagra and Levitra work by interfering in the normal functioning of your body. If you want the technical explanation, it goes sort of like this:
When you experience a normal state of sexual arousal, your brain begins sending messages to hormone producing glands such as the pituitary gland to cause these glands to commence or increase hormone secretion.
A cascading series of physiological responses then follows. The heart rate increases, blood vessels dilate, and primary sexual arousal signifiers such as pupil dilation and skin flushing occur.
Incidentally this flush is what some women’s cosmetics attempt to simulate, because men are attracted to women who appear to be sexually aroused.
As sexual arousal continues, the brain stimulates nerves around the genital area to channel more blood towards the penis and testes. It is at this point that some really fascinating things start to happen.
An enzyme called cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) acts on blood entering the corpus cavernosa (a pair of sponge-like tubes that run along the length of the penis) and causes the blood cells to start releasing their internal stores of nitric oxide. This allows the penis to expand and become erect.
As the corpus cavernosa expand, the pressure created by this action compresses the veins in the penis so that outward blood flow is slowed down, and also compresses the dorsal artery of the penis so that blood pressure inside the penis increases. This is what allows you to maintain an erection once it has been obtained.
Now what Viagra (or sildenafil) does is it prevents the normal breakdown of cGMP in your blood by inhibiting the action of another enzyme called PDE5.
Then the artificially elevated level of cGMP causes blood cells to release nitric oxide making it possible for you to obtain an erection in a similar way to what would happen if your brain had ordered extra cGMP production naturally.
There are some problems with this artificial interference which I will talk about a little later, but the fundamental issue is that the penis is not the only part of the body that responds to cGMP.
When cGMP levels are raised in the genital region as a result of sexual arousal, this is a natural process and a targeted reaction to send cGMP to where it is needed.
Sildenafil, on the other hand, just slows down the rate of cGMP degradation throughout the entire body, and blood cells respond to it by releasing nitric oxide everywhere, not just in the penis, and that can lead to harmful consequences.
Most other erectile dysfunction drugs, including Levitra (vardenafil) and Cialis (tadalafil) also work by inhibiting the PDE5 enzyme, and some of them are potentially even more dangerous.
When your body stops producing natural erections, it does that as a way of signaling to you that something is wrong. By artificially inducing an erection with medications, you are ignoring the underlying problem entirely.
Reason 2: ED Medications Can Cause Hearing and Vision Loss
One of the major problems of erectile dysfunction drugs is that they cause higher than normal concentrations of cGMP throughout the entire body and not just in the penis.
This is a big concern because cGMP has other roles besides helping you develop erections. One of these roles is to help your brain convert light that enters your eye into electrical signals that your brain can recognize (a process called phototransduction).
Normally the levels of cGMP in the eye are naturally regulated by the body, but erectile dysfunction medicines interfere in normal cGMP lifespan. This affects the blood supply to the eye and also important functions within the eye itself.
The risk is especially increased if you are already predisposed towards retinitis pigmentosa or other congenital eye defects.
As if going blind wasn’t enough to worry about, there is more and more evidence emerging that links Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra with sudden onset hearing loss and even complete deafness.
So here is what we know for certain: There is strong and compelling evidence that erectile dysfunction medications have caused severe harm to men who have used them…
And you can’t necessarily trust the evidence put forth to suggest these drugs are safe because drug manufacturers have a reputation for being less than straight-forward when it comes to disclosing negative side effects.
Reason 3: Erectile Dysfunction Medication Can Kill You
Blindness and deafness are obviously serious side-effects, but they are not occurring frequently enough to be described as common…yet.
But there are many other side-effects that are considerably more common. These complications are common enough that they begin to move out of the category of “possibly could happen to you” and into the “probably will happen to you” category.
The experiment that led to the discovery of Viagra was originally conducted in an attempt to create a new heart medication. It turns out that Viagra does indeed have an effect on the heart, but not always in a good way.
Many thousands of patients have complained of side-effects that include:
- Severe heart burn
- Nausea and/or dizziness
- Headaches
- Tinnitus
- Dyspepsia
- Skin flushes
A rare scientific study into the potential harmful effects of sildenafil confirmed that consumption of this drug and similar medications significantly increased the risk of developing some or all of these symptoms.
Studies also found that consumption of ED drugs could increase the risk of developing deadly melanomas by as much as 84%.
The patients who complained about these side-effects were the lucky ones, by the way. Quite a few others never got a chance to complain.
Did you know, for example, that 15 years ago researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center reported that: There appears to be a high number of deaths… associated with the use of Viagra?
If you haven’t, you’re not alone
Next…
Reason 4: ED Drugs Can Increase Cortisol Levels
Cortisol does bad things to your body when you’re under a lot of stress.
In a natural situation, you normally only come under a lot of stress in extreme situations, such as when you’re in physical danger.
Once this happens, cortisol acts on your adrenal glands, signaling them to produce adrenalin so you’ll have that extra bit of power to fight or run away from the danger.
Now here’s the problem…modern living creates a lot of other stresses and worries that don’t involve any physical danger.
People worry about all kinds of things like their career, their finances, how well their kids are doing at school… Your body doesn’t know the difference between these things and really dangerous things, so it keeps pumping out cortisol in response.
The problem with this…is that cortisol has many negative effects when you get it at the wrong times, in the wrong amounts.
One of these effects is, it ruins your libido. In fact, excess cortisol is behind why many men even consider using ED medications in the first place.
You can probably already see that if cortisol is causing the problem and the medication you take to treat it actually raises your cortisol levels, that is just making the original problem worse.
You’ll become more dependent on the drug, which is good news for the manufacturers and bad news for your finances.
Your sex life will also get less and less satisfying, as your forced erections eventually make you feel like you’re just going through the motions without much real desire to have sex, which is what makes it satisfying in the first place.
Reason 5: ED Medicines Don’t Treat The Root Cause Of The Problem
When you stop getting natural erections or lose your libido, it is a clear signal from your body that something is wrong internally.
Your physician may try to reassure you that this is just something that naturally happens to most men as they get older. Don’t you buy that for a second!
They tell you this for a reason, and one of the reasons is that quite often they actually believe it. They believe it because they’ve seen hundreds of older patients experiencing the same symptoms and perhaps they’ve even experienced the symptoms themselves. They’ve also read a lot of literature repeating the same message, over and over again.
This kind of thinking puts the cart before the horse. In scientific parlance it is known as the “No True Scotsman Fallacy”, in which somebody makes assumptions based purely on conjecture and circumstantial evidence.
Yes it may be true that many men over 40 have lower testosterone levels and many men experience problems with libido and erectile dysfunction. But to assume that this is an entirely natural process without thorough investigation is a huge over-simplification.
The problem with this logic is that it doesn’t consider a whole range of other possibilities. For example there are many men at least twice that benchmark age who experience rock-solid erections and still have an active sex life. Are they unnatural?
Here are a few other things to consider:
Healthy people don’t usually go to see health professionals…
Somebody who is not experiencing ED or related problems has no reason at all to discuss their sex life with their physician, and it would probably be considered inappropriate if they did
Many people over 40 have created quite stressful lives for themselves. They may have moved up to a more demanding position in their work, they often have started a family, bought a home, and gotten into debt. All these things create worry, and worry creates cortisol, and cortisol kills libido
Many people between the ages of 40 and 65 are busier than at any other time in their lives, and so they may not give as much thought to sex.
Many women going through menopause begin to experience a loss of libido, and this affects the sex life of their partners. Healthy men do not have an equivalent to menopause. Only unhealthy men do.
Many people over 40 have other health problems not related to ED, but the medications they are taking for it could be contributing to ED.
So the people who the health professionals are seeing are not specimens in prime condition. Strictly in terms of health, they are the worst representatives of their demographic, and this introduces bias in the minds of the doctors.
In other words: They are not healthy, which is why they have gone to the doctor for help.
They are experiencing problems with their libido, which is why they are discussing that matter with their doctor
They probably have busy, stressful lives, which is why they are seeking an instant solution, usually a prescription for Viagra.
They probably have a partner close to their own age who is going through menopause and therefore their sex life is winding down. Under the “use it or lose it” principle, they are in the process of losing it!
The good news is that you don’t have to join them down at the doctor’s office! You have the power right now to take control of the situation and turn it around, all by yourself.
Remember, if you just rely on a “magic pill” to solve your problems, you are not fixing the underlying condition that led to the problem in the first place.
Inside you are still a sick man, and if that underlying condition is left unchecked then it could continue to get worse, and in the most extreme cases it may even kill you. This is not something we should just shrug off as “natural”.
Things You Can Do Right Now To Help Yourself:
You don’t need to spend a fortune on little blue pills or nasty injections. You just need to care for your body the way you should have been from the start.
Here is a quick list of simple things you can do:
If you’re a smoker, quit smoking
There are few things you could do to your body that produce more cortisol and other harmful effects than smoking. There is nothing sexy about smoking.
Drink In Moderation
Just like smoking, drinking alcohol puts a lot of stress on your body, especially your stomach, liver, kidneys, and brain. This stress increases your cortisol levels and if you are really drinking a lot then the subsequent damage to your brain and central nervous system can lead to a loss of penile sensation, which of course is not going to help your libido.
Make sure you get enough sleep
It’s not always easy, but you’ve got to try. Getting enough sleep will help get your cortisol under control. If you aren’t sleeping enough, your cortisol level will be higher, which can make you moody, which can impact your relationships, which will raise your cortisol even higher.
Eat nutritious foods
If your diet mainly consists of processed foods that are full of sugar, bad fats and artificial additives, you are putting a lot of stress on your internal systems and that will also raise your cortisol (and make you feel terrible anyway). You will find plenty of advice on this website about good food choices that will help you feel better.
Choose health supplements that will boost your natural abilities, not artificial remedies that force your body to react unnaturally
Good health supplements work with your body to improve the way it already naturally functions. Most pharmaceutical medicines do the opposite, by modifying a natural process in your body to force an unnatural reaction. Again, you can find a lot of information on this website about different supplements that can really help you.
Try to worry less
Worrying about problems can become a habit, but it’s a habit you should break because worrying about your problems doesn’t solve anything…
So when you find yourself starting to worry, you either need to think of a solution for the problem…or simply remind yourself to let it go because worry and strong erections rarely mix.
Steer clear of porn
Many people actually think of using porn to get their engine revving, so this advice may seem most surprising of all. But actually what porn does is it changes your mind chemically, so sex isn’t exciting anymore….
That old saying “familiarity breeds contempt” can be applied here, because when you see too much of something over and over, it becomes ordinary, and ordinary rarely elicits a sexual response.
I’ll conclude with this…..
By avoiding dangerous erectile dysfunction medications designed to induce artificial erections and following the seven points listed above…you will put yourself on the road to recovery.
And I promise you…if you go after this with gusto you’ll start to see results quickly, and will soon be waking up on most days with a healthy length of morning steel.
P.S…If you made it all the way to the end of this article, I suggest you read this one next.
References:
Viagra: A Systematic Review of Harm
Deafness and Phosphodiesterase-5 Inhibitors
