Eli5 Why do you need to call a doctor if your erection lasts longer than 4 hours after taking male enhancement medication?
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Blood clots. Here’s the deal:
* Erections are created by using some special muscles to trap blood in the penis, causing it to inflate.
* Blood’s default state is clotting. Your blood vessels have to be actively adding a “don’t clot-now” chemical to keep it from coagulating. So whenever blood is left to sit stagnant and not flowing for a while, there’s a risk it will start to coagulate and clot. Basically it starts solidifying.
So if you have a 4h erection, there’s blood pooling for a long time in the penis and just sitting there. It can start coagulating and forming clots. The real problem is when the erection does dissipate, these clots can then be pushed out into your general circulation system where they float around and may end up plugging something really important like an artery to your brain or heart.
The lack of blood flow can lead to scarring and tissue death, and that can lead to erectile disfunction.
Priapism
With many erectile dysfunction medication (or UnderDaCounter if you’re drinking in the Caribbean) Your wood stays wooden partly because so much blood flows into the tree trunk that it compresses and blocks the outflow – blood doesn’t drain out of it as quickly as usual, thus, blood backs up and fills up the penis and it gets hard
Cool
BUT if you back up the blood by preventing drainage, for too long, the tissue of the timber will eventually stop getting enough oxygen and nutrients because not enough blood is coming in, because not enough is draining out. If this goes too long, the tissue begins to starve, and things that starve eventually die.
Call a doctor so that medical care can be provided to evacuate blood from the penis (back to the body or with actual drainage) so that new blood can come in and replenish the oxygen and nutrients that your woody tissue craves.
[In depth explanation from the National Library of Medicine](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459178/)
An erection occurs when chambers in the penis, called the corpora cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum, become engorged with blood. The blood in those chambers flows fairly slowly. Slow-flowing blood tends to clot. The longer it flows slowly, the higher the risk of clotting. Clotting is dangerous because a clot can completely interrupt blood flow, leading to permanent damage to the organ. A short-lived erection is unlikely to suffer clotting, but after 4 hours of continuous erection, the risk of clots goes up.
What happens is called priapism. The blood isn’t allowed to flow back into the body, and thus, isn’t circulating to get oxygen. Permanent tissue damage and tissue death will occur due to the lack of blood circulation, and the blood also begins to coagulate and thicken. A couple ways to treat it are, one, they use a needle syringe to suck blood out of the engorged penis to get the coagulating blood out, and when that doesn’t work, they will flat out use a surgeons knife to cut the penis open to get the blood out. I believe by the time it’s at this stage, tissue damage and even death is occurring. It is an extremely unpleasant experience.
Others have answered the question but this is so rare it often ever happens. I only hear of it when guys combine it with something like Caverject (injection to the penis to get hard). If anything it was amazing marketing for the pills though.
I have never heard of anyone having this issue personally and we used to pop them like candy in the party days.
If it does happen or you think it is happening Ephedrine or Pseudoephedrine is a good counter action to it.
I remember my ex’s step dad died of a heart attack outside a prostitutes room after taking viagra, was very awkward when the police had to explain it all to the mum
To brag!
but seriously, blood does important stuff, it carries oxygen & removes waste. It has to flow in & out of all of your body.
If you turn your pp into a one way street it will cause a traffic jam. If the traffic jam lasts a really long time people will run out of gas & leave their cars.
Now your street is a parking lot. You can’t get your groceries delivered. The garbage men can’t haul away your trash.
Your street turns into a wasteland, people get sick & eventually your street dies & falls off the map like a eunuch’s penis.
An erection lasting more than 4 hours is a priapism. The blood is trapped in the corpus cavernosum and the pressure can damage the nerves in the penis. The longer the erection lasts, the more damage there is and the harder it is to treat. At the 4 hour mark, medications may work well. If it has lasted much longer, the doctor will usually use a large needle to remove the trapped blood and deflate the erection. If that doesn’t work, they will head to the operating room to slice the penis along the length in a couple of places.
Complications of a priapism include: nerve damage, loss of function, and gangrene among others.
It is a serious condition that requires immediate treatment by a urologist.
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