Eli5 Why do you need to call a doctor if your erection lasts longer than 4 hours after taking male enhancement medication?
In: 219
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.
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.
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/)
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