Is Erectile Dysfunction a Symptom or a Disease?

According to Dictionary.com (medical dictionaries do not provide any better definition than those that follow), a Symptom is a phenomenon that arises from and accompanies a particular disease or disorder and serves as an indication of it.

A Disease is a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment. 

Few diseases have just one symptom; most have several. Sometimes there’s one big symptom that points a physician to a particular diagnosis. As an example, the appearance of specific skin eruptions will flag measles – a viral infection – as a disease that needs little additional testing to confirm. Fever and a red, inflamed and irritated throat can lead to a quick identification of Strep throat, a bacterial infection, but often a culture is taken to rule out any other possible cause.

What about one disease, here dis-ease might be more appropriate, such as erectile dysfunction, that is the result of the cumulative effect of many causes? Medical science doesn’t really have a name for that. Sure, if a man has had surgery or an injury to the erectile mechanism, there may be a single reason for lack of function, but 70%+ of men with ED, don’t have any identifiable cause. Unless we look at lifestyle, of course.

Taking genetic and developmental errors out of the definition, these men – the 70%+ -- can point to almost all of the other “disease” factors as the reason for their inability to get an erection: infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity,  unfavorable environmental factors, illness, sickness, and ailments.

Here’s what you have:

·                     Infection: your dietary habits, especially the consumption of processed sugar, opens your body to yeast infection. Your woman may buy some vaginal ointment to get her through a bad bout, but you might have caught it too. It can fester in your penis, and you can pass it back to her. Further, if you’ve had oral sex – presumably when she’s asymptomatic – you might have ingested it as well. It can live in your gastro-intestinal  tract and blossom when you pound down an entire bag of M&Ms or honey roasted peanuts. Yeast – Candida – will stress your adrenal glands and throw your hormones out of balance. It will contribute to erectile dysfunction.

·                     Poisons: aspartame (artificial sweetener), chlorine and fluorine in water, food dyes, nitrates in processed meats, and all those things you can’t pronounce that are listed in the ingredients of your packaged foods are all poisons. Many are cytotoxins that kill cells in the body, numb your nervous system, and again, stress your adrenals.

·                     Nutritional deficiency and imbalance: Duh! It is unlikely you’d be reading this if you didn’t have a diet from hell. I don’t mean diet as in “weight loss.” I mean diet as the complement of food and drink you consume. When was the last time you had a salad – or maybe a salad a day for an entire week? I’ve written a lot about this, including my book “HARD!” It’s a major factor in losing your bone.

·                     Toxicity: There’s lots of overlap here. Infections, poisons, and unfavorable environmental factors all lead to toxicity. Pain medications – excluding aspirin – and other prescription and over the counter drugs tox you badly. The pesticides on your food and in your water add devastatingly to the toxic load on your body. This goes straight to your man-parts.

·                     Unfavorable environmental factors: Ever come home and the little lady has scrubbed the floors and polished the furniture, and removed all the soap scum from the bathrooms, and cleaned all the windows? Okay, me neither. But when there is cleaning to do and the cleaners, solvents and polish are aerosolized in your home, it will tax your liver and contribute to shutting down your dick. Certainly if you use a polish for your tires or dashboard, or spruce up the leather seats of the car with a particular product from whose lawyers I’d rather not get a letter, you’re inhaling those fumes for weeks until they finally dissipate. The new carpet or paint at the office will do the same. They weaken the body’s ability to communicate within itself. Orders from the brain to boner mechanics don’t get there effectively, and when they do, the valves that control erection hydraulics don’t respond as they should.

·                     Illnesses, sicknesses and ailments: All of the other factors I’ve bulleted suppress your immune system. You become susceptible to getting sick. Sickness itself will stress your internal organs as they try to support an immune system that's under attack. Non essential functions, like erections, get shut down as other systems drain resources to try to keep your alive.

·                     Mental and emotional stress: I guess this might have been included as an “ailment,” but it’s so fundamental to maintaining or regaining full erectile function that I thought I’d break it out separately. I’m not going to convince you to ignore all the shit that’s happening in your life. You may be out of work or working for a complete asshole, and in a lousy relationship, and not having gotten laid in about a year, and finding out you’ve got bone issues when you anniversary comes around. Plus there is the political and social scene [see: http://robinader.com/BanNews.htm], and more. But you’ve got to understand that internalizing all this and letting it foment in your mind is going to blind your dick to any opportunity that comes along.

So have I answered the question? Erectile dysfunction is both a disease, and a symptom of many other diseases and effects.

I treat each of these in my book. The good news is that while you may have many causes of your ED, you may only have to deal with some of them and only to some degree to bring you back up above the threshold you crossed that stopped your dick from working.

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2nd Edition updated May 2012 is "NOT just for those with Erectile Dysfunction"

HARD! Maintaining Potency, Eliminating Erectile Dysfunction, and Enjoying Healthy Sex for Life is for all men who want to keep functioning well  throughout their life. This concise and powerful men’s health guide provides a protocol for how to do everything right.

Available at BN.com/Nook, Apple, and Amazon/Kindle.

Also available in iBooks, Kobo, Sony and all eBook formats for immediate download:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/65109.