It is most curious how reading a simple sentence can suddenly take you back to your own childhood. There I was, somewhere around eight years old, and I got my first bicycle. Not a new one, I confess. My parents thought that second-hand was best because I would rapidly outgrow any machine. As the years went by, I acquired a sequence of slightly less than new bicycles until I was old enough to get motorised wheels. This nostalgia lay dormant until a TV advertisement some years ago in which a father reluctantly buys his son the racing bicycle he has been coveting and observes with a sad shake of his head that the saddle will, “cut him in half”. Today, I was looking down a list of risk factors for erectile dysfunction (ED) published by the Mayo Clinic, and the last item of their list is, “Prolonged bicycling”. It seems that the television father was right to be concerned about his son’s safety.

At this point, all men reading this should get off their bicycles immediately and order cialis online. Bicycles are dangerous to your sexual health. Except, of course, this would be a completely irrational response. Cycling always has been an excellent form of transport (particularly given the current need to save the planet — I say ban the internal combustion engine right now). It is also an excellent form of exercise both in its own right and for weight loss purposes (enjoying the planet is best done when we are healthy and fit — the cialis will still come in useful as well). (more…)

When we are young and everything is working well, it never occurs to us that anything can go wrong with this wonderful machine we all live in. The human body gets wrapped up in a myth of invincibility so we do many things we should not do at all, and do many things that are intrinsically not so dangerous to a dangerous excess. That is what being young is all about. We all have to learn where our limits are. Of course, this includes sex and most will experiment both with conventional sex and sex in conjunction with recreational drugs. Taking cialis to maintain stamina over a long weekend of activity is safe. Other substances may be less helpful. (more…)

When anyone mentions erectile dysfunction, the people within earshot tend to act as if someone just died. As a topic, it is so intimately associated with shame and embarrassment that it has become the ultimate conversation stopper. If life is a battle between you and nature that you can’t win, impotence is nature’s way of saying no hard feelings. (more…)

Modern medical textbooks have all become so much more informative. A simple statement reflecting the vast amount of knowledge that has been accumulated through research over the last one hundred years. Yet, when you look at these books, you are confronted by mountains of facts about increasingly minute processes within the body. Students are expected to be impressed by the depth of knowledge because instead of one sentence approximating how a muscle works, there are now whole chapters devoted to the thin muscle filaments containing multiple proteins. Instead of simple engineering analogies of muscles and cables, human knowledge has become obsessed by the identification of ever more complex chemical and molecular processes. This is my wood-for-the-trees moment. (more…)

Every year, the pharmaceutical industry in the USA spends billions of dollars on direct-to-consumer advertisements for medications that are only available on prescription. In other countries, such advertising is often banned. Advertising to the medical profession is, however, universal - companies need to inform doctors of the products and their use. (more…)

The problem with writing articles is that it forces you to take a small piece of something complicated and say a little about it. In a book you have more space to explore the issues at length - which neatly bring me to Impotence: a Cultural History by Angus McLaren, Chicago Press, 2007. This is a fascinating historical survey of cultural attitudes towards impotence through the ages. It starts with the Greeks and Romans and slowly works its way up to modern times. To some extent, it retreads the same ground as the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault (in three volumes) but without the same depth of philosophical postmodernism to inform it. Some readers may prefer McLaren because he is more descriptive than analytical. (more…)