Willing to Put in the Work?

Article by Patrick M. Carpenter, MS, PharmD, RPh

Do you remember learning how to ride a bike? Did you just hop on the bike and take off perfectly balanced and go for a 100-mile bike ride, or did you fall a few times? It took a while to learn how to balance and pedal to keep yourself upright, didn’t it? You probably even had training wheels on your bike to make the process simpler.

Accomplishments in life usually require effort and sacrifice. It’s no different when regaining one’s sexual prowess or learning to integrate erectile dysfunction medicines into your sexual routine.

What does learning to ride a bike have to do with erectile dysfunction? Well, it’s an analogy to remind you that the most important accomplishments in life usually require effort and sacrifice. It’s no different when regaining one’s sexual prowess or learning to integrate erectile dysfunction medicines into your sexual routine. I’m sure everyone just wants a magic pill to make everything easy – and erectile dysfunction medicines may be easy – but there is still some effort required on your part.

Hopefully the medicine works every time and lives up to every expectation, but we do get calls or posted questions from guys who have sporadic results with the medicine, and they usually don’t fully understand what’s causing variability in their performance.  The tendency is for these men to ask for a stronger medicine or to be switched to a different treatment option altogether. Medication strength may be the problem, but if we switched every patient who called asking for something else without taking the time to get to the root cause of the problem, we’d miss opportunities to help more men achieve success. That’s why we encourage every patient to take the time to learn about how the medicine works, how it should be taken, and what factors can affect the results.

It’s not uncommon for menMD clinical case managers to speak with men who are on injection therapy when, on occasion, an injection doesn’t provide the desired result. The patient’s tendency is to blame the vial of medicine. All previous injections worked so it must be the meds, right? When we take the time to unpack the issues and understand the patient’s dose response relationship, and advise on proper injection technique we almost always fix the problem using the same vial that previously failed.

When we’re finished collecting all relevant information, we will explain to you what’s happening, and, together, develop a plan for you to try.

The ‘discovery’ process can take 10 to 20 minutes. When we’re finished collecting all relevant information, we will explain to you what’s happening, and, together, develop a plan for you to try. If the plan works, great! If not, call us back and we will work with you until we get it right.

The point is that whether we are dealing with an oral medication, a lozenge, a gel, or an injection there are things you need to learn about using your medicine that will take time to understand. If you stopped trying to learn to ride the bike the first time you fell over you would not know how to ride a bike today…
If you are willing to put in the work to understand your medicine, we’re here to offer expert help to get you to a place where you know how to make it work reliably every time.

And when you need help figuring out what’s going on, or what to try next, or what external factors may be contributing to a varied response, menMD clinical case managers are here to help you figure it out.

I’ll leave you with a final analogy. If you want to build muscles, you don’t go to the gym once and lift a 200-pound weight and leave perfectly fit and strong. You build muscle through a dedicated pattern of working out over time. Treat your erectile dysfunction medicine the same way. Understand one dose isn’t going to answer all of your questions. One dose may not be the same as the next dose because of a myriad of external factors that may affect your response. How much alcohol did you have? How much sleep did you get last night? How stressed are you about a big project at work? Are you taking cold medicine? Are you anxious because you are with a new partner? Learning about how your body responds to the medicine is personal, repeatable experiment of trial and error. And when you need help figuring out what’s going on, or what to try next, or what external factors may be contributing to a varied response, menMD clinical case managers are here to help you figure it out.