The Nocebo Effect Of Medication

The opposite also applies however and this is called the nocebo effect.

At Ukmedix News we know quite a lot about the placebo effect of erectile dysfunction drugs. In the hundreds of different clinical tests done on the medications Viagra, Cialis and Levitra it has been seen the when a placebo pill is administered up to 40 percent of the men involved say that they experienced a positive affect from the dud medication.

It goes to show that much of what we feel in our bodies has a lot to do with what we are thinking in our head. There is no doubt that if you give a man a pill of any sort and tell him that it will improve his erectile function there is a good chance that he will actually experience better sex.

The opposite also applies however and this is called the nocebo effect. Researchers have managed to prove that if you give a man a medication for say high blood pressure or depression and you warn him that it may also as a side effect cause him to get erectile dysfunction he is in fact far more likely to have erection problems than man who is unaware of the fact that this side effect exists.

This can pose a certain dilemma for some doctors as obviously they do not want their patients to experience the side effects of anything that they give them but nevertheless they are duty bound to warn them. It is important therefore that doctors strike the right balance and do not over emphasise erectile dysfunction as a side effect and play it down as much as possible.

In one case that we heard about at Ukmedix News doctors working at the University of Florence decided to conduct an experiment with a drug that is used for prostate problems and which can cause erectile dysfunction as a side effect. What they did was administer the same drug to all of the patients but they only told half of them that there was a possibility of them experiencing erectile dysfunction. In the group who were warned about the erectile dysfunction side effects 31 percent of the men said that they had suffered from erectile dysfunction. On the other hand only 9.6 percent of the men who were not warned about erectile dysfunction suffered from it.

It goes to show that the nocebo effect is a very powerful one and should be borne in mind by doctors prescribing any medication that has erectile dysfunction as a side effect.