What’s one of the best ways to improve a man’s sexual health? Get him to stop worrying about his “junk.” And one of the best ways to wring out the worry is to ensure that things look normal down there. It can be that simple.
Worry Warts
About a decade ago, we published a paper reporting that 80-90% of men with curved penises, termed Peyronie’s disease, admitted to having emotional problems. Most worrisome to them were the loss of penile length and the inability have sex due to the curvature. Pretty reasonable concerns when things aren’t straight. Not only that, it taught me that anatomy down there matters to men. A lot.
The Missing Link
I recently cared for a young, single, successful man who saw me because he was having a serious problem with a dramatic loss of erections with sex. It had been going on for years, and in many relationships, and it had gotten to the point that he avoided intimacy, lost his sex drive and had terribly low self-esteem. Not only that, vitamin V, the erection pill, didn’t help. He was beside himself.
Straight Talk
Given that fact that a serious erection problem can be a risk factor for the early onset of heart disease, I evaluated the erectile dysfunction thoroughly and quickly cleared him of any significant risk in this regard. He failed the usual workhorse erectogenic pills and so we moved on to discuss using even bigger guns: “local” therapy for erectile dysfunction.
But before I began that conversation, I circled back with him about one thing I noticed on his physical exam: He was missing a testicle in his sack; it was undescended since birth. I learned that when he was 6 months old, a groin exploration was performed and no testicle was found. As a result, only one ball resided in the corner pocket.
“Does it bother you to have only one testicle?” I asked him. “Well, yea, Doc. I was made fun of a lot by my brothers growing up and have always been pretty sensitive about it. I kinda feel like a freak of nature.”
“Do you think that your sexual partners think it’s freaky?“ I continued. “No one’s really brought it up, but I bet they do,” he responded.
“If you were to have a similar feeling “testicle” down there along with your own, what we call an implant, do you think that you would feel more “normal” and less like a “freak?”
“Probably, Doc, but you know I never thought about it.”
Believe it or not, his next treatment for erectile dysfunction was not an injection but a testicular implant. It gave him a gloriously well-matched pair of family jewels. And guess what? Within a few months, the erection problem disappeared, his confidence and countenance improved and his self-esteem and libido hit new highs. By 6 months, he was not thinking about how he looked down there anymore and he managed to find his way into a healthy, sexually active relationship. Just like that. Imagine. As Jill Badonsky says: “Here’s to the moments when you realize the simple things are wonderful and enough.”
This article first appeared on Dr. Tureks’ blog.
