This will be a pretty bleak post, but it may be useful to some of you. My experiences of 13 years on ED pills.
After a few failures in my early 50s, Horny Goat Weed had minimal or no effect. GP prescribed Viagra 50mg. The first time - bang! a massive hard on, light headedness, a great fuck, took 10 - 20 years off my performance. I was fine for a few years cutting 100mg pills into 4 which had good results with no failures and no side effects. Sometimes it felt a bit wooden and insensitive. Tried Levitra (Vardenafil) which I haven't seen mentioned in this thread. That required more stimulation but maintained a good erection, felt more natural.
When Viagra patent expired I switched back to Sildenafil, gradually needing to increase the dosage, still working fine until a year ago when upping from 75mg to 100mg didn't work. I was hoping Tadalafil (also available free from GP) would be a magic bullet, but I find it less potent than Sildenafil. A fruitless GP discussion, tried daily Tadalafil which produced a nice semi permanent lob on but not enough for penetration. GP advised that overdosing wouldn't solve it and he's right. I am currently using 133mg Sildenafil and fail around 2 out of 3 attempts. Overdosing causes blue tinge vision but no other side effects.
I recently popped my punting cherry hoping that I would rise to the occasion with the combination of new partner excitement and non vanilla stuff.
I really enjoyed the experience and will repeat, but couldn't get hard enough for penetration (27mg Tadalafil).
So where do I go from here? Next on the list is retrying Vardenafil (I think Levitra patent has expired). I am not confident due to previous experience of it being gentler. If that doesn't work I could just accept that there are many pleasurable sexual activities apart from penetration; or take a drastic measure such as implants with saline bag and manual switch.
The 'accepted wisdom' in the medical journals is that all PDE5-inhibitors (viagra, levitra, spedra and the rest) use similar pathways and are supposed to be similar in effect (apart from things like duration of effect and speed of onset). So if you don't get any effect at all from one you are likely not to get an effect from the others (which could be due to a lot of things, including drug interactions with other meds you might be on, psychological factors or even chance on how you were feeling that day, had last eaten and so on). But in practice people find differences. Even the medical community thinks that viagra gives the most reliable woody.
Your 'punting cherry' is a bit of a psychological factor I'd think. Being with a civvie that you fancy that is giving genuine feel-good fuck vibes for most people is very different to a prossie on spec. If the civvie stops giving you a woody you decide you no longer fancy her but if a prossie gives you the same reaction we think it's the meds. My own feeling is that it is a fuck site easier to fancier a reasonable-looking chick who you know deep down is just a 'fucking slag' (no offence, but she's not the punter's girlfriend)
if the body is propped up with chemicals.
I did a post here a little while ago with a run down of medical evidence from sites like Consumer.org and to a lesser extent Examine.com that do quick lists of controlled studies and so on.
https://www.ukpunting.com/index.php?topic=233551.msg2387589#msg2387589 . There's a big difference of course between things for which there's no proof of an effect, and things for which there is proof of
no effect, but at least it gives you a starter for some hope. Examine.com mentions two studies suggest that
Horny Goat Weed has no effect that could be determined. Looking in my own files, there's a paper called
Asian herbals and aphrodisiacs used for managing ED (Lim 2017) that talks about giving it to castrated rats. They find some suggestion it might work over a long period but without increasing testosterone levels. A lot of these things if they work at all seem to require daily use for quite some time (by which time a lot of customers will forget about complaining). Another study (
Use of Herbal Products and Potential Interactions in Patients With Cardiovascular Diseases, 2010) Horny Goat Weed may be dangerous for your heart ('atypical ventricular arrhythmias' i.e. going too fast, slow, or irregularly).
Fenugreek extract... i.e.
Are you talking about the seeds or Testofen the active ingredient extract?
I had some success with the latter but it’s gotten damn expensive!
...has much better press.
Testofen is a standardised formulation of the extract with "50% fenusides" (by weight) which is an important bit to look for if buying
fenugreek extract under any name. You can read about it in some of these studies:
Physiological Aspects of Male Libido Enhanced by Standardized Trigonella foenum‐graecum Extract and Mineral Formulation, Steels 2011 (that's the posh Latin name for it in the title). The other one I saw that mentions it was
The effects of a commercially available botanical supplement on strength, body composition, power output, and hormonal profiles in resistance-trained males, Poole 2010.
Some manufacturers bung in other stuff that is supposed to help.
B6, zinc and
magnesium it seems to help if you were deficient in them in the first place.
One of the things I noticed was that you're supposed to use it for 3 weeks to see if you get an effect. Another that
fish oil is supposed to increase its efficiency. Another that it can make your piss smell of maple syrup though not necessarily harmful, especially for golden rain enthusiasts.
