In some cultures, men who have sexual difficulties rely on traditional remedies. These substances are called aphrodisiacs – the word coming from Aphrodite who, in ancient Greece, was the Goddess of Love – and they are believed to improve sexual desire and performance. Examples range from herbs, the powdered horns of large animals to preparations made from beetles and insects. In the majority of cases, these have no physical effect on the body but, because they are recommended by respected authority figures in the local society, the affected men usually find them effective. This goes to prove the general rule that, if the mind is willing, the body responds. The medical profession calls this the “placebo effect”.

There are three prescription only medications on the market to treat erectile dysfunction. Chemically, they all rely on the same basic active ingredients and work in the same way. Recently, the American College of Physicians asked the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to find out whether there was any evidence to show that one was more effective than the other two. There have only been four clinical trials making a direct comparison between the three and 122 trials studying the drugs individually. The conclusion was that the three drugs are broadly similar in their levels of effectiveness and safety. But the majority of men preferred one of the drugs because, in one form, it produces thirty-six hours of sexual potency. In the once-daily form, men taking the drug have levels of response broadly the same as “normal” men who have not been affected by erectile dysfunction. Thus, in terms of convenience and effect, an increasing majority of men prefer to buy cialis. However, this system of recommendation and sale by word-of-mouth, is exactly the same as the process for selling oysters as an aphrodisiac. Merely suggesting that oysters give you great sex sells them. It’s the same with drugs. If men are recommended one drug and they have a good experience with it, they may never try the others. Trusting the product to give a known result creates buying habits. In this instance, unlike oysters, cialis has a very precise physical effect which gives sexual responsiveness. Comparing it to an aphrodisiac for marketing purposes is fair. Otherwise, you can trust cialis to work, no matter what others may tell you.

If you watch movies or TV series, it’s unusual for the scripts to deal with relationships in trouble because of sexual difficulties. The mainstream media has the same problem as most people. Everyone finds it embarrassing and humiliating to talk publicly about sexual failure. Indeed, the improvement in treatments has made it more difficult. When men can buy pills over the internet without a prescription, no-one need know there were failures in the bedroom. Reputations must be maintained. As to women, most would like treatment but find many doctors patronizing and dismissive. Their problems remain hidden. Yet this desire for privacy from both genders is unwise. There is clear research evidence that people who regularly engage in satisfying sex live longer, cope well with stress, have a better immune system and enjoy a better quality of life. Getting treatment is the better option no matter embarrassing it may be to ask for help.

The cause of erectile dysfunction is easy to state. The arteries feeding blood into the penis fail to dilate. These arteries are one-quarter the diameter of the coronary arteries. If the small arteries are in trouble, the larger arteries may follow suit in about four to five years time. At this point, there is an irony. Cialis and the other drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction dilate the arteries and are also approved by the FDA for the treatment of poor artery performance in the chest. Innocently taking these drugs will delay the onset of high blood pressure and heart disease, but it will not prevent it. The arrival of erectile dysfunction is your canary in the mine. All doctors have received an advisory note that anyone over the age of 40 years coming in for a consult should be treated as a heart patient until there is evidence to the contrary. There are a good range of treatments to reverse the build up of plaque in the arteries. They start with a healthy diet and physical exercise, and then move into the drug cabinet. It is common sense to have a full physical check up if you have erectile dysfunction. Taking early action to avoid heart disease is worth it in the long term. In the short term, you can buy cialis as a treatment for the erectile dysfunction. That will keep things going in the bedroom while the rest of your body recovers.

One of the problems was that, if you asked people about sex, they were embarrassed and tended to refuse answers. There were also professional difficulties for those who proposed to study sexuality. Such research was thought to betray unhealthy and prurient interests. Then along came William Masters and Virginia Johnson in St Louis. Not caring what the “establishment” thought, they invited people into their laboratory and began to monitor exactly what was happening in their bodies during arousal. As their research was published, it swept away the mythology and the embarrassment, finally allowing people to understand what was happening to their bodies.

Through this open door, a small army of modern researchers has entered and, with medical experts able to devise drugs like cialis to restore sexual function, the question is now being asked, “Have we gone too far?” Medicine has reduced complex desires and emotions to biology. If there is a problem, all you have to do is take a pill or have cosmetic surgery, and all will be well again. Except life is not always so simple and convenient. Science gives people the wrong expectations. Doctors cannot solve every problem. Worse, there are new myths about what the sexual norms have become. Although it’s true that cialis allows sexual responsiveness for thirty-six hours, people have to eat and sleep. Even with the very best of the drugs inside you, you still get tired. So, it’s a balancing act. Without Masters and Johnson, people would have remained largely ignorant on all issues of sex and sexuality. The resulting development of cialis has improved the quality of life for millions of men. Yet everywhere you look now, you see sex and many now use erectile dysfunction drugs for recreational not medical purposes. People should not lose sight of how relationships work. Medicine has a role to play but people should be more interested in the needs of their partners.

The constant use of drugs may not be in your interests in this instance. Although the main drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction (viagra, cialis and levitra) are very safe and effective in all but the exceptional cases, the fact of erectile dysfunction, particularly in men over the age of 40 years, may be a first symptom of more serious medical problems. Even though you may not have any other symptoms, you will be safer if you have a full medical check-up. Why safer, you ask. The way your body produces an erection relies on the walls of the arteries leading into the penis dilating when you are sexually stimulated. This allows more blood to flow into the penis and inflates it into an erection. If something prevents the arteries from dilating, there is no erection. These arteries are about one-quarter the diameter of the primary arteries leading to the heart but, putting it simply, arteries are arteries.

If you have a problem with the narrow ones now, you may have a problem with the wider ones in about four or five years time. There are many reasons why the arteries may not dilate but the more worrying involve a hardening process when platelets are deposited from the blood. Left untreated, this leads to arteriosclerosis and potentially serious heart problems. All doctors were sent a medical advisory in 2006 which instructed them to deal with all men reporting erectile dysfunction as actual heart patients until the contrary is proved. This is a vital first warning symptom and a quick intervention with a change of lifestyle and treatment can restore health to the blood vessels and relieve the problem of erectile dysfunction. Leave it too long before you get treatment and there is no effective cure. The best you can hope for is treatment to prevent the situation from getting worse. This is not to say that drugs like cialis will not work. They will dilate the arteries during the early stages of arteriosclerosis. But there will come a point when the damage is too great and cialis will stop working. So the moral of this story is to get your doctor to check you out before you buy cialis online. Self-treatment in this instance is not a wise move.

If the arteries leading into the penis will not dilate properly, there will be no erection. Simple fact, isn’t it? Smokers are significantly more likely to experience erectile dysfunction than non-smokers. But there is a further issue. The arteries in the penis are only a fraction the size of the arteries that pass through the lungs to the heart. The damage to the blood vessels that first appears as erectile dysfunction can turn into angina and heart disease as time passes. Arteries are arteries no matter which part of the body they pass through. So if the muscle walls are hardening in one part, this will spread to other parts. Indeed, research shows that smokers are more likely to have heart diseases. All doctors were sent a medical advisory in 2006 which instructed them to deal with all men reporting erectile dysfunction as actual heart patients until the contrary is proved. This is a vital first warning symptom and a quick intervention with a change of lifestyle and treatment can restore health to the blood vessels and relieve the problem of erectile dysfunction. So the moral of this story is to get your doctor to check you out before you buy levitra or something else. Self-treatment in this instance is not a wise move.

Levitra is not only approved as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. The FDA has also approved its use as a treatment for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, i.e. to reduce the blood pressure in the arteries passing through the lungs by dilating the arterial walls. But here comes the problem. Once the arteries start to harden, they will continue to do so unless you quit smoking. The first symptom is loss of sexual function. Then come all the heart diseases you know. If you quit smoking early enough, start to eat a healthy diet and exercise, the arteries will return to normal, your sex life will be great and you will enjoy a healthy old age. But nicotine is an addictive substance. It’s hard to quit. This leaves the middle course. Those who cannot quit use levitra. This restores sexual function in most men for a reasonable number of years and delays the onset of heart disease. But this is only a delay and it forgets the other problem. If you are still smoking, the cancer may get you before the heart disease. So the best, all-round advice is to quit smoking – ignoring all misleading labelling and marketing that some cigarettes are safer than others. No matter what it takes, give it up and enjoy a good quality of life including sexual activity into retirement.

Ignoring the physical difficulties of sexual intimacy when the partners are significantly overweight, those who run into diabetes or heart disease will find all sexual activity restricted. Add in the effects of smoking and the risk to sexual function rises dramatically. A recent non-scientific survey into sexual health looked at the relationship between lifestyle and erectile dysfunction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collect information about the rates of obesity, diabetes and smoking across the US. All these correlate to erectile dysfunction. The research team then examined data about exercise habits, discovered how many urologists were employed by hospitals in each city, and collected the data on the number of prescriptions written for erectile dysfunction drugs.

The results confirm that more prescriptions are written in southern cities where the rates of obesity are higher and people exercise less. In fact, Tulsa in Oklahoma came out as the least healthy city with the highest rate of prescriptions written. Northern cities like Boston and New York which have active campaigns to promote healthy eating, e.g. to ban the use of trans fat in all cooked food outlets, and extensive bans on smoking in public places, have the lowest rates of prescriptions written. The study is unscientific because not all prescriptions written are ever converted into drugs, and many people use the internet to buy cialis and the other erectile dysfunction drugs without a prescription. Nevertheless, the results are interesting and match common sense expectations. The message is clear. Both generally and in relation to sexual health, men improve their performance if they lose weight, quit smoking and start exercising on a regular basis. The risk of serious diseases reduces as weight falls and nicotine clears from the system. But if people ignore the risks, continue smoking and eat too much, they are likely to find themselves using cialis at a young age and losing their sexual potency in their middle age. It’s hard to understand why anyone would make the deliberate choice to risk disease and lose sex.

The main physical cause of erectile dysfunction is the arteries leading into the penis do not dilate or, having dilated, then constrict before sexual activity is over. Because nicotine constricts the arteries, smokers are significantly more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction than men who have never smoked. There is, however, some moderately good news. If you are not a heavy smoker and you quit while reasonably young, the walls of your arteries will slowly begin to resume normal activity. But if you delay quitting until arteriosclerosis has set in, there is no remedy. The erectile dysfunction is likely to be permanent even if you quit. There is further news that, depending on your point of view, may be bad. The longer you smoke, the greater the chance the nicotine will reduce the level of sperm you produce. Thus, even if you do manage ejaculation, you may not become a father. As an aside, the risk of infertility is significantly greater if you smoke cannabis.

The drugs like cialis used to treat erectile dysfunction are vasodilators, i.e. they encourage the walls of your arteries to dilate. If the walls have been damaged by smoking, the drugs will not work well or at all. This should all be news encouraging you never to smoke or, if you have the habit, to quit immediately. The risks to your health are not worth the short-term pleasure you get from the nicotine. This does not deny the difficulty many have. Nicotine is addictive and it can be hard to break the dependence. Indeed, many manage to give up for a few weeks and then lapse. There are products to help you quit and counseling can help support you through the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. If you find yourself craving, think of the potential loss of sex as the price you may pay for lighting the next cigarette. Cialis is good and will keep you going for a while but, in the end, impotence will catch you out (assuming the cancer does not get you first).

This is not to deny that erectile dysfunction undermines self-confidence and, if not remedied, may cause depression. But men have been quick to embrace the idea that pills can be a cure for all their problems. The pharmaceutical industry has become very profitable as a result. However, there is a critical difference between the classical aphrodisiac and modern medication. There is no evidence that any of the usual aphrodisiacs have any beneficial effect on the human body. The good results almost inevitably come from the placebo effect. The couple so strongly want to believe that eating this food, drinking that concoction or rubbing on that ointment will produce good results, they end up enjoying themselves. Even if the product fails, they are often embarrassed and will not ask for their money back. So the myths of success are born. But modern medication now has the backing of science. The drugs are PDE5 inhibitors and there are wonderfully technical explanations of how they work their magic. At one level, this is the modern equivalent of the shamen dancing round a fire waving an animal skull around, but the clinical trials produce scientific evidence of success. The men who take this medication do get erections.

Recently, there was a piece of comparative research to decide which of the three drugs currently available to treat erectile dysfunction produced the best results. The answer confirms a simple truth. The majority of men prefer cialis in both versions. As the “weekend pill”, the word-of-mouth is strong that there is thirty-six hours of sexual activity available. Men who start with this drug are usually so pleased, it never occurs to them to try either of the other two. Now that a once-daily version of cialis is available, men can return to their youth with sexual responsiveness on demand 24/7. Issues of convenience and effectiveness sell the drug and have converted it into the brand leader in many national markets. The fact that all three drugs are based on the same chemistry and have very similar levels of effectiveness and safety counts for little. Men are sold by the reality they really can go for the whole weekend. Once sold, the placebo effect improves the performance enabled by the chemistry. The mind and the body make a great team when they work together well.