Viagra: forget the jokes, we need a serious discussion

Viagra is the men's health story that you can't keep down. Everytime you think it's gone to sleep, it just keeps bobbing up again. Now, there are at least 900 good smutty jokes in that intro but we here at malehealth are going to manfully resist making any of them. This is serious.

Recently, the site was phoned up on a Sunday morning by the Daily Mail desperate to cover the story of the UK's so-called Viagra divorce. A London woman had apparently cited her husband's 'irrepressible sexual appetite' as a result of using the anti-impotence pills as 'unreasonable behaviour' in her divorce petition.

Of course, this is the sort of cheap titillation that keeps tabloids like the Mail in business but the actual story hardly justifies the page lead it was given. One case - or even several cases - does not make a moral panic. What the journalist was after therefore from malehealth was confirmation that hundreds of other women were being similarly pestered by pill-popping partners. There is certainly no evidence of that as far as feedback to this site is concerned.

A lot of British men have used Viagra — perhaps half a million. It's a serious drug for a serious medical condition that also has the potential, if used improperly, to have serious side-effects. It deserves more rational, thoughtful coverage than it gets in the media at present. We told the Mail that tablets aren't really the long-term solution to sexual health problems, that problems were usually more deep-rooted and that to blame a drug for a divorce was the result of looking outside for something to blame rather than looking at the relationship itself. The paper, to be fair, printed this.

But our call for good sense was hardly helped by the announcement in the same week of Viagra's so-called loyalty scheme. The manufacturers Pfizer are offering seven tablets for the price of six in the USA. This story made many of the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pfizer's spokesman flagged the promotion up as follows: 'This is like a frequent flyer programme where we are building a relationship with our patients for the long term'. Frequent flyers. Ha, ha, ha. The Daily Telegraph described the whole thing as a marketing stunt and it's hard to disagree.  The point is: it takes two to have a responsible discussion. Pfizer says that 23m men have tried Viagra at least once — that discussion is clearly very overdue.

If you or your partner have used Viagra or any of the simlilar products such as Levitra and Cialis, let us know. How did you get them? Were they prescribed or did you buy them privately? What were you told about them before use? What were the effects?  Were there any problems? Malehealth wants to start that serious discussion.