I Talked To A Doctor About Erectile Dysfunction...For A Friend

Each year Americans spend over $5 billion on erectile dysfunction drugs. This is more than twice what they spend on toilet paper. 

Dr. Christopher Asandra knows this, and says it's ridiculous. Dr. Asandra founded NuMale Medical Center in Milwaukee in May of 2013, a clinic which specializes is penile injection therapy (yikes) for erectile dysfunction. He vehemently opposes ED pills and claims his injection treatment has a 99% success rate. The cost of this procedures varies, but can be as little as $150 per month, which, if you compare it with the cost of Viagra—roughly $25-30 perpill—might be worth considering.  

While I personally consider my penis to be in tip-top shape and the perfect hue of pink, the thought of injecting anything into the penis is a concept that needs to be explored. Because needles. In a penis. So I asked Dr. Asandra everything penis, his methods, and what exactly is in those pills people keep gobbling down. 

Also, it has been confirmed: If you don't use it, you'll lose it. 

So, what exactly do you guys do? 
As men age, our testosterone levels decrease along with our sense of self-confidence. We don’t feel like we’re 21 anymore. The idea is to restore these guys to their youth. We utilize bioidentical hormone replacement therapy with testosterone. We also do PRP, which is Platelet-Rich Plasma therapy for penile enhancement and restoring function. PRP is being used by athletes...it’s been used by Kim Kardashian on the face for the vampire facelift.

We take your own blood, harvest it, and inject it back into the penile tissue where it heals everything. When you cut your finger and there’s a scab, that scab is Platelet-Rich plasma. So we take that stuff, inject it into the penile tissue and it tends to heal everything in there.

Are these effects similar to Viagra?
Well we always want to stay away from Viagra and pills because of the side effects and the damage it can cause. We take a very therapeutic, science-based approach like testosterone replacement. Most of our patients have high blood pressure, diabetes…a lot of them are obese.

Guys are taking these pills, even though it’s not a very medical approach. It’s kind of a Band-Aid, a temporary fix. Ninety-nine percent of our guys, we can give them an erection again without any pills.

But why would a man choose putting needles into his penis over pills? 
One is the therapeutic part of our treatments—we have a painless micro-applicator that restores blood flow down there. Viagra was actually discovered as a heart medication initially—the side effect they found during trials was that men were getting erections from it, too.


Ninety-nine percent of our guys, we can give them an erection again without any pills.

So they halted all the trials and Pfizer decided to market this as an erectile-dysfunction medication. They knew they’d make billions of dollars, and they did. When you take a pill, it goes everywhere in the body: your eyes, your heart, your brain, your lungs; it goes to all tissues of the body and it affects everything.

What's the worst that can happen when taking a pill? 
There are awful side effects. That's why you experience headaches, flushing, blurred vision, blue-green vision, chest pains. The injection method is a local application and it’s therapeutic, meaning it actually increases the blood flow down there. This puts medication directly into the penis and rehabilitates you.


Viagra doesn’t restore the blood flow as well—it’s a temporary fix.

It’s essentially like putting your penis back into the gym. It’s like looking at a person in a wheelchair—his legs are shriveled up from atrophy. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Viagra doesn’t restore the blood flow as well—it’s a temporary fix.

There’s a science to taking these pills: you’ve got to take them two hours before you have intercourse and you can’t take it on an empty stomach. It might give you a headache, stuffy nose.

What are your thoughts on the unregulated gas station drugs you see everywhere? 
I don’t know how those are still around. They’re sold as supplements and mixed with herbs and sometimes tainted with a different molecule of Viagra...the bad thing about it is that we don’t know what this stuff does to you. You know, you’re taking these pills and they’re going throughout your whole body. They’re not FDA-approved.


It’s essentially like putting your penis back into the gym.

People seem pretty convinced that stuff works. It's reported that Americans spend over $34 billion a year on alternative medicine—but you're saying you shouldn't take them at all? 
No. A lot of these—and I don’t know if you remember the whole Enzyte controversy—but they sold all of these products and it’s like a Pandora’s box on the inside. You don’t know what’s in there. Some of them are Viagra derivatives, like these steroids people buy at GNC, which have derivatives of testosterone.

A lot of these pills contain herbs from Africa or Asia and nobody knows what they are or what they do. They know it works over there, but people don’t know what’s in it. They’ve got to get banned eventually.

It seems like you're saying the obvious choice is to just avoid pills.
Yep. At NuMale, we don’t just give you an injection and say goodbye...we follow up with you. We do ultrasounds, you want to make sure you get the results you want. It’s not just a temporary fix for people who want to have sex again. We’re restoring your penis’s vitality.

Hooray for penises?
Yes.


Jeremy Glass is the Vice editor for Supercompressor and his favorite part of the day is searching Google for sad erectile dysfunction stock photos. Tweet him your favorites at: @CandyandPizza