Herbs vs. Viagra
how do herbal remedies really compare to pharmaceutical enhancement?
Viagra is prolific…
…introduced in the Spring of 1998, by the end of the year more than a million prescriptions had been filled.
Within 20 years it was ubiquitous.
And along with its prominence, and our overwhelming cultural reliance on the pharmaceutical industry, we’ve lost our understanding of how to holistically support men’s health. So when the earliest signs of performance issues arise - the best time to address them, reverse the pattern, and nurture innate sexual vitality - instead a lot of men quietly turn to Viagra or its counterparts and do nothing more.
A few things to consider:
1) if erectile dysfunction is affecting so many American men it’s a silent epidemic, because we don’t hear much about it, which suggests men aren’t as comfortable as we might hope in discussing this issue and seeking healthy solutions.
2) if Viagra was introduced just 20 years ago, what did men do for performance issues prior to that?
3) and the fundamental - why is this issue so incredibly prevalent, and what’s causing it?
Let’s start at the end:
Xenoestrogens and endocrine disruptors.
For the past roundabout 70 years in the western world synthetic chemicals that either are estrogens or mimic estrogens are entering mens bodies and altering the androgen/estrogen ratio far more dramatically than anything we’ve historically experienced. Warnings about these trends and the epidemic of male infertility, plummeting testosterone and impotency that would surely follow have been getting steadily louder. One of the more recent names spearheading this research is Dr. Shana Swan, whose warnings about male health are pretty terrifying, which she outlines in her aptly named “Countdown”, where she links the fertility crisis with endocrine disruptors. You can read a bit more about her work here.
To really address ED we have to think about it holistically, and treat it holistically.
And how do we do that?
First, we pay attention to the earliest warning signs, and thoughtfully fold changes and additions into our day to day, as early intervention and preventive medicine, the way our ancestors have been doing medicine for centuries. Not waiting for symptoms to get bad enough to need pharmaceutical intervention, but nudging the body back toward balance and vitality.
And though the western medical model doesn’t have great tools for addressing male virility holistically, herbal medicine does. A class of herbs known as adaptogens work directly with the endocrine system to re-regulate hormone production, and some of them are known to increase testosterone levels over time while decreasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that compete with its production. A number of the herbs in this class also have an affinity for enhancing sperm count, quality and motility. So, herbs have got the stuff you need here.
And how do these herbs stack up in clinical trials?
The short answer is - surprisingly well. With Viagra and its cohort - we see an average of 80-85% response to chronic ED. With herbs with the same PDE5-inhibitor activity that Viagra function with, we see similar numbers in “improved sexual function” in clinical trials, and many of them with male and female participants, and with a dramatically diminished incidence of side effects. We also see clinical trials focused on Epimedium, which contains icariin, showing promising results for ED treatment. And we see raises in serum testosterone levels in trials with herbs like Withania somnifera, Tribulus terrestris, etc. and with L-Arginine supplementation.
But a few things worth considering when we look at contemporary clinical trials involving herbal supplementation:
One of them won’t surprise you, and it’s the general lack of clinical data. Because plant medicine doesn’t stand to make pharmaceutical companies literal billions of dollars, funding is rarely allotted to such trials.
There are other things that aren’t frequently highlighted as problematic though, and validity of empirical data is one of them. Many of these herbs come with centuries if not millennia of clinical observation. The people and health care practitioners of antiquity weren’t dumb and they weren’t guessing. They were often meticulously observing outcomes, noticing trends of the plant medicines they worked with, and passing this information along to future generations. The fact that we’ve discounted empirical evidence as a way of knowing says more about our cultural values than the validity of the data.
But another thing to keep in mind, is that herbal medicine isn’t typically designed for short-term use in clinical trials. It has been used as a protocol - over time, regularly, and alongside other changes that gently move the body toward balance. We’d be better served to see clinical studies comparing 6 weeks of therapeutic herbal protocol with increased movement, to sildenafil dosage as ED treatment.
I suspect we’d find the former control group walking away from the study with an improved sense of overall wellness as well as sexual vitality that sustains itself.
And the latter completely reliant on the sildenafil.
Some cited studies for further exploration:
