Word: viagra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...promise of Viagra is its discretion and ease of use. Doctors recommend taking the pill an hour before sex, which might lead to some wastage among overly optimistic users but shouldn't otherwise interfere too greatly with the normal course of coital events. An even greater advantage, or at least a more naturalistic one: unlike the injectable drugs, which when efficacious produce an erection regardless of context (famously proved by Dr. Giles Brindley, a leading British impotence researcher, who once demonstrated a successful experimental treatment by dropping his trousers in front of hundreds of astonished colleagues at a conference), Viagra...
Even supporters of the pill worry about hyped expectations. "People always want a quick fix," complains Dr. Domeena Renshaw, a psychiatrist who directs the Loyola Sex Therapy Clinic outside Chicago. "They think Viagra is magic, just like they thought the G spot worked like a garage-door opener." In the wake of fen/phen and Redux, the diet-drug treatments that were pulled from the market last year after it was learned that they could damage heart valves, caution would be advisable with Viagra. But so far the side effects seem comparatively slight and manageable: chiefly headache, flushed skin, upset stomach...
...there's something unnerving about Viagra too, not so much on the face of it (the drug's merits appear to be manifold; doctors think it might even improve the sexual response of postmenopausal women) but in the broader philosophical implications. Is sexuality, like the state of happiness or male-pattern baldness, just one more hitherto mysterious and profound area of human-beingness that can be pharmaceutically manipulated, like any other fathomable construct of enzymes and receptors? Another looming question: Since Viagra is taken--at prices ranging from...
...what about the impact on the freighted social interactions we euphemistically refer to as dating? "I bet that within a year, you'll see women's-magazine articles saying, 'How to Tell If It's You or Viagra,'" says James R. Petersen, who has written the Playboy Advisor column for the past 22 years. He adds, "I think Viagra is going to be as monumental as the birth-control pill." No less an authority than Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine, believes the drug will "free the American male libido" from the emasculating doings of feminists. And not only that...
From a drug manufacturer's point of view, this burgeoning of the potential market has coincided quite nicely with the development of pharmaceutical treatments. (At least two more impotence pills are in the pipeline from different companies.) Before Viagra, the most promising therapies involved putting gel suppositories in the urethra and injecting drugs directly into the base of the penis. The downside is not hard to grasp. "You can imagine the look most patients gave when I told them they would have to stick a small needle into the most sensitive portion of their body," says University of Chicago urologist...