Erectile Dysfunction | The Treatment Is Surprising

A gentleman presents to the clinic and wants help with erectile dysfunction.

He wants a medication like testosterone or Viagra to help fix the problem.

But what he doesn't realize is that this is a warning sign that a catastrophe has been brewing for over 15 years.

He googled how to raise his testosterone naturally and found that sure, if he exercised more,

lost a little weight, took some vitamin D, and slept better, he would improve the problem by a little bit.

But what I'm asking him to do would improve the problem by this much.

The cause of his erectile dysfunction is a decreased blood supply to his appendage, so much that his penis cannot get firm enough for penetration.

His tool is flaccid.

Let's take a look at why that happened and how he can prevent this.

This is a picture of an artery.

It's actually one that's been cut in half.

But I want you to specifically notice how many different layers of live tissue are surrounding that blood that flows through your arteries.

An artery is made up of muscles and skin layers, and they all need to have optimum health to deliver the amount of blood that's needed for that organ.

So this skin layer is very smooth, and this muscle layer is thick and contracts and relaxes upon the desires of the body.

In a healthy, normal body, this looks like this.

The catastrophe that's been brewing in this patient started out looking normal, but the first early signs of disease nobody told him about.

This actually showed up in the layers of his artery called a fatty streak.

This had no symptoms associated with it and could only be found if we would have biopsied one of his arteries and looked inside.

A few years later, you would have actually seen a high blood cholesterol if I tested his cholesterol in the clinic.

The high cholesterol was actually a reflection that this source of fuel - yes, cholesterol is a fuel - was being delivered to the body through the bloodstream.

It left the liver, went into the bloodstream, and then was supposed to go to all these tissues in need of fuel.

When the delivery truck was done, it should have recycled back into the liver.

The amount of time spent in the bloodstream is called the residency time of cholesterol.

And healthy people have a low residency time, meaning it doesn't circulate very long.

It goes into the blood, delivers its fuel, and then goes back to the liver.

This patient, unbeknownst to him, was having a high residency time, and the way I could measure that is his cholesterol was strikingly high.

In addition, that fatty streak was getting thicker and filled with more disease.

The next step led to a higher level of pathology, higher level of disease, when he recruited some

of his white blood cells and red blood cells to actually take better care of what was happening in his artery wall.

You see, this isn't the best place to store cholesterol.

The only reason it's there is because it couldn't get back into the liver.

When the body ran out of storage in the liver, it used the artery wall as a really large storage shed for depositing cholesterol.

Except this needs to be reversed.

And these white blood cells and red blood cells started to do that by invading that fatty streak and trying to undo it.

If you could touch that part of the artery, it would actually be a little tender.

It's very inflamed. It hurts a little. Except you can't feel the inside of your arteries.

The next step led us to the first place where I could ever see that this problem was happening.

And that's because as these white blood cells and red blood cells came into that disease and tried to clean up the problem,

they left behind some debris, some trash, and that trash is actually calcium.

We can see calcium on an x-ray. So if I did a really specific, intense x-ray of his artery, I could see little calcium deposits in the wall of his artery.

Now this problem has been going on for at least five years.

And again, he has no idea that he is doomed for some erectile dysfunction and something much more dangerous.

This is where you really begin to see a much heavier problem for the patient.

Notice how much thicker this wall is than it started out.

Here's the size that it started at the beginning.

And by now, after fatty streaks and white blood cells and calcium deposits, it's thicker and it's ruddy.

It's got some scarring in it.

And all of this is a sign of things to come that are not so good.

As you look at what's happening for this patient, the blood flow through his penis, through this artery in his penis is still pretty hardy.

But the disease state inside the artery wall is now about to erupt.

The kind of eruption you don't want to talk about when we're talking about penises.

This is actually what happens right before that tender accumulation of goo was happening in his artery wall.

I like to think of this as a pimple.

In fact, if you took a camera in and you looked at what's happening here, it would look like a pimple with a little

white dot in the middle and there would be a tenderness all around it.

The danger is it's very volatile.

And what happens next in this patient would be an eruption of that tissue into the blood supply.

The blood does not like this.

This is very dangerous and that rupture now triggers a reaction.

Little particles in your body called platelets and fibrinogen do their job by starting to control this disaster happening in his penis.

And the blood supply begins to slow down and then it comes to a complete halt.

This stoppage of blood supply is necessary to keep this area of the tissue alive.

What we're hoping is that the body will figure out how blood flow

can continue past the blockage because if there is no restoration of the blood flow,

all the tissue downstream from this blockage will die.

If this artery was in his heart, we would call it a heart attack.

If this artery was in his brain, we'd call it a stroke.

But when it's in a penis, it's usually a painful feeling in his penis for a few hours.

And I guarantee he is not going to come in and tell me about that painful feeling in his penis, especially if

he's lucky enough that a tiny amount of blood supply gets returned to his appendage.

But this restricted blood flow is the reason he's asking me for testosterone or Viagra.

You cannot get a hard erection with this low of blood supply.

The blood supply is a trickle.

And that part of the artery that was supposed to be in charge of relaxing and allowing a large amount of blood flow into the penis,

enough to get a firm erection for penetration, no longer is possible.

Adding back the hormone of testosterone isn't going to do much for this patient.

We have some serious problems that are erupting all over his body.

Yeah, these tissue images were used to explain what happens with a heart attack or a stroke.

But these arteries that are flowing through your heart and your brain are also the ones that flow through your penis.

And when that gentleman presented with a problem that his penis wasn't working right and wanted

to blame the hormone of testosterone, I'm saying he needs to focus on a different hormone.

This hormone is insulin.

And if you want to know if your insulin is high, these five predictors will tell you.

Triglyceride, HDL, blood pressure, waistline, and blood sugar.

And that disaster that I'm worried about that he doesn't know about is a looming heart attack or stroke that's on its way.

If you want to learn how to unclog these arteries and prevent a heart attack or stroke, check out this next video.

I'll teach you there.

English (United States)