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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

> The OxHARP trial was a meticulously designed double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving 75 participants who had experienced a minor stroke and showed signs of mild to moderate small vessel disease. Each participant received sildenafil, a placebo, and cilostazol (a similar drug) over three-week periods in a randomised order.

I feel like dudes will know if they got Viagra or not? It doesn't seem like cilostazol has the same kind of effects on them, or does it? So is it really a placebo?

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Viagra doesn't "make" you hard, you still need sexual stimulus. I've taken it and then the sexual opportunity fell through, so I went back to coding or whatever, and I didn't notice anything different.

Dang, that is a sad tale.

Severe warning. I have no sexual problems and took a viagra once.

It definitely was automatic and persistent.

It was terrible. It wouldn’t even go away when I was done with it.

Pseudoephedrine

You shouldn't mix uppers and downers.

It’s one of the things they might give in a hospital for it.

The espresso martini would like to have a chat with you.

Small doses are fine

Why the downvotes? People are giving wrong and dangerous advice.

Yeah, you can say “well just don’t take it if it’s not prescribed.”

But don’t bury the truth. If you don’t have ED and you take it, the GP is wrong.

> Viagra doesn't "make" you hard

It definitely does.

> you still need sexual stimulus.

Not really, or to a much lesser extent.

Maybe that's just java language, have you tried with other ones?

But it does frequently cause nasal congestion, unrelated to sexual simulation

It’s not unrelated actually, there is some tissue inside the nose cavity that is similar to the erectile tissue of the penis. That’s why the nose gets “stuffy” from sildenafil, and that’s why you sometimes sneeze when aroused.

A curious question, is nasal congestion has any correlation with high blood pressure?

I wouldn’t know. Sildenafil lowers the blood pressure, so I would expect the negative correlation.

I think it's vascular dilatation, it creates an effect similar to an inflammation : inflated, red, tissue

See also levomethamphetamine, the mirror image of meth found commonly in drugstores in Vick’s inhalers, acting as a vasoconstrictor

I can (at the ripe old age of 78) confirm this completely. Without stimulation, nothing except facial flushing. With stimulation, and only with stimulation, a functioning erection.

> nothing except facial flushing

What does this mean?

Person takes pill, face gets a bit more rosy than usual. I guess it has an effect on small blood vessels everywhere.

Thank you.

Tangent:

> Conclusions: Niacin alone can improve the erectile function in patients suffering from moderate to severe ED and dyslipidemia.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21810191/

>Without stimulation, nothing except facial flushing.

and for me, a stuffy nose and splitting headache.

Wrong python. Hehehe

>Viagra doesn't "make" you hard, you still need sexual stimulus.

That's Cialis, Viagra should make you hard even when you're in the confession booth talking to a priest.

Viagra = standing at attention pretty much no matter what is going on. Cialis = you have to have the mind/stimulus.

which one makes the priest hard?

Viagra was approved in the 90’s and Cialis in 2003, so I’m guessing none of them..

I have experience with both, this is not the case.

Maybe, but maybe not. If I told you I'm either giving you actual viagra or a placebo, you might get more aroused even if given placebo. Because psychologically you'll be thinking "There's at least a chance I took viagra right now"

the placebo effect does not work like that. You dont get physiological benefits just by thinking you have them.

Being more aroused is not a physiological benefit.

To have no placebo effect, the random patients in the brain blood flow trial would need to all be unable to get erections, or something.

Isn't that the exact definition of the placebo effect?

you dont get antibodies against viruses just by thinking you have them.

Even if this is obviously true, that does nothing to support the original statement. That's a whole different claim that you had to fall back to.

Which is a motte-and-bailey type of argument.

if the placebo effect only works for a minority of ailments then its probably something else like you know, regression to the mean

And yet such thinking can in some cases increase your chances of surviving the viral infection. That's the placebo effect.

where did you see something like that?

A placebo has no physical or physiological effect at all, it can only affect what the test subjects think or pretend they feel.

Viagra doesn't work for everyone; it's not like you take it an get automatically erect, even with sexual stimulus. There are many reasons for ED, some of them in the brain, some of them in hormones. Viagra only helps with cardiovascular ones.

I had a highly intelligent and good looking roommate with ED and it was devastating that at such a young age he couldnt’t maintian an erection even with viagra, cialis. I urged him to see a doctor and it turns out the ‘baloon’ down there that gets filled with blood also has a valve to keep the blood in. He had a misfunctioning valve and blood was leaking out and erection was soft. Sad story, as it seems to have had psychological effects on this person. Not sure it was much they could do at the time other than a manual pump fix. He did have a girlfriend though and they found other ways around it, though I heard she was cheating on him in search for a normal experience.

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