Michael Finley

"Overcoming Impotence"

Reprinted from his "What Ails You?" columns for Twin Cities Business Monthly

© 2003 by Michael Finley

"A few of the boys and me were talking about our experiences with erectile dysfunction...."

Now there's a sentence you don’t often hear in the locker room. Men share little enough  without divulging the darkest benchmark of their sexual quotient: that there is a dwindling point to their exclamations.

And that is the biggest problem today with impotence, or erectile dysfunction, which affects some 50 percent of men between the ages of 40 and 70. Out-there Bob Dole to the contrary notwithstanding, impotence remains for most men a topic of shame.

"Just the fact that it's so widespread should make men feel less embarrassed," says Jon Pryor, head of the department of urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota, and author of In the Male: Everyone's Guide to Men's Health. "Yes, it's sad that it's so common. But there should be some safety in those numbers. It isn’t just happening to you -- it’s happening to half the men your age that you work with."

We really are living in the age of impotence, Pryor suggests. For the first time, people are talking about it, a little. We're learning that what we used to think about the condition ("It's all in your head!") now turns out to be wrong. And despite our lingering discomfort with the malady, we are learning, one of us at a time, that it be readily treated with a very high rate of success.

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