A jolt to the penis may cure impotence, study says

By Brian Alexander/ msnbc.com contributor

In case you had any doubts — and how could you after all those football-through-the-tire, middle-aged-men-channeling-Elvis, kitchens-turning-into-rainforests commercials — men value their erections.

When our penis hydraulics fail, we’ll swallow our pride and the magic pills, and if they fail, we’ll vacuum pump it, tie it up with rubber bands, use a needle and syringe to shoot drugs into it, and, if none of that works, we’ll have the poor guy reamed out and stuffed with plastic tubes we can fill with salt water for woodies on demand.

Now some Israeli doctors have tried yet another technique: shocking the poor thing. Using something they call “low-intensity extracorporeal shock wave therapy,” a team from the Rambam Healthcare Campus in Haifa actually succeeded in giving recalcitrant penises a boost.

A year ago, they announced that a study using both tissue in culture dishes and actual human erectile dysfunction patients appeared to indicate that applying shockwaves to the tissue sparked the growth of new blood vessels. That’s important because erections are caused by blood rushing into the penile vasculature. Often, as men age, we accumulate vasculature damage. Sometimes as a result of diabetes or cardiovascular disease, the penile blood vessels degrade. E.D. pills like Viagra boost blood flow into the penis to compensate. More >