Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 03:58

We are going to talk about the canary in the coal mine, penises. Erectile dysfunction, more importantly, maybe not more importantly, but erectile dysfunction can precede a cardiovascular event by three to five years.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 04:13

Isn’t that crazy?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 04:14

Yes.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 04:16

And I believe it too. And I’ll tell you why I believe it. And this is what actually mo Kir? And you’ve had mo Kir on your podcast before, so he says that erectile dysfunction is actually not a disease. It’s a symptom of underlying cardiovascular health, which I think is really amazing as a urologist. I think it’s one of the reasons why I love urology so much, is because I can use sexual function as a gate, right as a door that opens up a man into the healthcare system where I can potentially change the trajectory of his life by literally making a topic of cardiovascular health sexy, I can literally make it sexy by correlating it with. Sex, right? And when we think about it, the anatomy and the physiology, it makes complete sense. I want to tell you about a pen analogy. Do you mind? And I conveniently have a pen right here. So I actually learned this in my fellowship, when I was at Wake Forest, and my fellowship director took out a pen, and this is how he would explain it to patients with a guy sitting right in front of him, just like you’re sitting in front of me. And he would say, All right, I’m going to push out this pen. And the tip of the pen is about the size of a cavernosial artery, and you have two of those that go to your penis, and the back part of this pen is about the size of a coronary artery. It’s about double the size, and that’s the size of the artery that goes to the heart. So of course, we would see disease in this artery before we see disease in that artery. And when people see this pen, this light bulb goes off that tells them why this conversation matters.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:03

Men most likely won’t go to the doctor for their heart, but they will go to the doctor for erection, all dysfunction. Yeah, we were chatting before, and you had mentioned that it’s happening earlier, that younger men are having symptoms, which, when we say younger men, I mean, we’re 20 years old. Yeah, 20s. How do we address this? Yeah.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 06:32

Well, here’s the problem. Men have no milestones that necessitate a visit to the doctor. Compare that to women. And I’m not gonna, this is not like a comparison of, like, men have it worse than women, or women have it worse than men. The reality is, it can all be challenging for any of us to, you know, access the healthcare system. But let’s take go back to when you and I were teenagers. I remember when I was probably, I’m gonna guess, like maybe 16 years old, and my mother said, Amy, it’s time to see a gynecologist. I was like, No, I was dreading that visit from the moment she said that until the moment I went to the gynecologist. But it was to establish care. It was because I needed someone to do my pap smear and I needed someone to do my breast exam, so I got plugged into the healthcare system. And we need to do our past mirrors every year. So every year we go back to the gynecologist, right? And then, if we have children, then we have to access the healthcare system again. But what is a milestone in a man’s life that says, now you need to get plugged in? I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 07:40

can’t think of one. I

Dr. Amy Pearlman 07:41

mean, there isn’t one, unless we think about, let’s say prostate cancer screening, right? And that screening typically would start when a man is in his 50 so we go from a young boy who’s seeing a pediatrician on a regular basis, and then once he graduates from seeing a pediatrician. So let’s say he goes to college,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:00

then

Dr. Amy Pearlman 08:00

what that person is not going to access the health care system for the next three decades? And then we wonder why it took John so long to get back into the doctor’s office. But what did we do to encourage that? Instead that defining moment when he’s going to see a health care provider is for prostate cancer screening when a finger goes up his butt. So how does that encourage?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:25

Just painted a picture that everyone is probably thinking.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 08:28

Of course, John doesn’t want to go to a doctor. And then think about your training. And I know my training. When did we ever have mandatory training in men’s health never there is not a single health care provider who has any mandatory training in men’s health. Now, okay, let’s think about the typical patient that shows up to a clinic. Right? Think about a typical clinical vignette, 60 year old, 60 kilogram man shows up to the ER with chest pain, right? So most of our clinical vignettes are of men, but not of male specific health concerns, right? And that’s where I like to talk about this topic. When it comes to male and female health, is because men don’t actually have it any easier than women, right? And going back to medical training, we had mandatory women’s health training, right? We may not have covered every aspect of female health, and certainly menopause care was not a part, a big part of a lot of our training, but we had, what six weeks of gynecology and obstetrics? What rotation do we have in men’s health? Right? We learn about the nuances of how sperm matures, but do we learn about how to help the 20 year old who comes into our clinic with Ed issues, or the 45 year old guy who has issues with low libido and difficulty losing, you know, fat, we don’t learn how to help the very basic concerns, and that’s a problem in our educational system.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 09:55

Yeah, you’re you’re framing it in a way that I hadn’t thought about before. I. Oftentimes, especially right now in the landscape, what we’re hearing is that menopausal health has been ignored, that we’ve missed it we have the Women’s Health Initiative, all of which are true. In addition, we also don’t have that same vocabulary for men’s health, other than perhaps optimization, which is a problem, both for women, obviously, and also your sister was on the show talking about osteoporosis and osteopenia in the 30 year old cardiovascular disease. It’s almost sex non specific when we learn about it and when we’re taught about it, other than the presenting factors. The other aspect is that for health of a again, I have a son, there is not a time in which he transitions from pediatrics to adulthood, and from what I’ve learned from your podcast and some of your discussions is that there’s this vascular metabolic interface. Where do we start from a health perspective,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 11:15

we start by discussing normal structure and function, because in order to understand dysfunction, we have to first understand the normal. So when I was at the University of Iowa, I had this incredible opportunity to educate about 200 men in fraternities,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:34

200 men. Oh, my God. Now if you’re single, that’s probably your dream. But if you’re not, 200 FRAC kids?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 11:43

Yes. I mean, doesn’t it sound like a disaster, like on all aspects one, why would someone like me want to even go into a frat house on a Sunday,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:52

if you guys are watching, if you’re listening to this, not watching it. Amy Pearlman is probably five three, I don’t know, 105 pounds.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 12:02

Yeah.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 12:02

Five

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 12:04

pounds, nailed it, nailed it. You’re going to the fraternity. And also, this was in your fellowship. Did you just decide that you’re going to educate the frat houses on sexual function?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 12:18

Yeah. So this is when I was on faculty at the University of Iowa, and the way that I got into the frat houses is I worked with a guy, so I implanted a lot of penile implants, and so one of my colleagues, one of my colleagues who worked for the company that I worked with, had a son. His name was Jack, and Jack was just starting off as a freshman at the University of Iowa, and so when I was on faculty there, I texted Jack and I said, I’d like to take you out for dinner to talk about an initiative that I’d like to work on. So I took him and his roommate out to dinner for pizza.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 12:58

Bad choice, I know, bad choice. And it was

Dr. Amy Pearlman 13:00

so funny. We were sitting at dinner and they were like, thinking about sharing a pizza. I’m like, give yourself one pizza each, and you can take out the leftovers. I probably should have chosen another spot, but it was a fabulous dinner, and we spoke about how we were going to educate men and fraternities on men’s health over dinner. And covid then happened, and I knew I wanted this initiative to be in person. So we had to wait, honestly, like, three years before we actually did it. So we actually ended up doing this when Jack was a senior at the University of Iowa, and the very first one that we did, I remember I walked into the auditorium and there were like 100 guys in the fraternity that were filing into the auditorium. And it was funny, because there were some guys that were dressed up in dressed up in in suits, and they looked so professional, and they were selectively walking up and sitting in the front row. And I thought to myself, no one just chooses the front row, especially during a talk that I’m about to I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:54

don’t know I do, but okay,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 13:56

I was so impressed with that. I realized later they were rushing the fraternity, so they had no choice. They were literally a captive audience. The room was full. And I remember I started off the discussion, and I had all these, like, demo products and pelvic models on the stage. And so I asked the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:13

group, just hardcore press I need to teach you. So

Dr. Amy Pearlman 14:16

I asked the group, I said, raise your hand if you know what Jack’s father does. And there were maybe like five guys in the back that raised their hands, and I said, Jack, why don’t you tell everyone what your dad does? And he said, Well, my dad sells penile implants. And the whole room erupted. But it was a great icebreaker. And the way that I started these discussions is, first of all, what is a woman doing in front of a group of men talking about your health, right? I like to call out the elephant in the room because, and I think that’s a very fair question for them to wonder. And the reality is, I know more about men’s health than I do about my own as a woman, and I’ve lived. My body for 39 years, and I say that because I’ve studied the male body, I’ve studied the structure and the function and the physiology, and I’m still learning about my body like I didn’t realize until somewhat recently, that I had more testosterone than I do estrogen. When you put all the numbers in the same units. And I’m 39 years old, and I’m a doctor, right? But the reality is, I’ve seen a lot of men in my practice, and I’ve studied it, and that’s why I’m standing in front of them, you know? And when I see a patient in my office and I I ask Bill questions about his health, I’m asking for the sake of really understanding his experience, and that’s how I get his perspective, because I don’t have his body, is I’m legitimately asking for the sake of understanding, right? So I like to call out the elephant in the room, and I verbally say to them, before we understand dysfunction, we understand normal structure and function. So I want to come at this from a place of abundancy, rather than from a place of deficiency. I’m not starting off the discussion saying, Well, if you have erectile dysfunction, I’m saying, Here’s a penis. This is what it’s made of. This is how it works. This is the role of nitric oxide. This is why things might not work, and this is what we do about it. And so we spoke about the presentation was divided into five parts, what I like to call the 5s of men’s health. Do you want to guess any of them? Let

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:20

me think about this five s5

Dr. Amy Pearlman 16:23

S’s,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:23

well, sexual sex,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 16:25

yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:26

sexual health. Was it sperm? Health, sleep,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:32

so

Dr. Amy Pearlman 16:33

that’s very important, but it was not one of these five

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:36

S’s, yeah, satisfaction,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 16:40

we’ll put that as part

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:41

of our links. Two out of five fine

Dr. Amy Pearlman 16:46

sex streams, steroids, sperm and size. So yeah, even in this discussion, I spoke about penile size,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:55

I love the elephant in the room. Yeah. Sex stream, sperm, size

Dr. Amy Pearlman 17:02

and steroids

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 17:02

and steroids, yes,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 17:04

and for each of those, we spoke about the normal, we spoke about the anatomy, we spoke about the physiology, what can go wrong and what to do about it, specifically for college aged men, which is very important. So let me give you an example when we look at that topic of streams, sure, urinary streams can be problematic as a man gets older and is in his 40s and 50s, as he goes through prostate puberty and his prostate grows older, right? But I tell these young, college aged men, you don’t have a big prostate because you are 20 years old, right? I tell them, Yes, prostate cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in adult men, but you do not have prostate cancer. So when you go online, and I fully encourage people to go down the rabbit holes of online, but they’re not typically age based concerns. So I tell them, if you go online and you say you have these urinary symptoms, and it says you might have prostate cancer. It’s very important that you know you don’t have prostate cancer, but this is my might be what’s going on. You might have pelvic floor dysfunction, because that can happen in 20 year olds, right? You might have a urinary tract infection, though that would be less likely, and you might be drinking fluids that are contributing to your bothersome urinary symptoms. So we made it very specific to them as college age students. Think the other interesting notion is that a lot of people think that men, especially young men, don’t care about their health. And Gabrielle, I beg to differ. I was in those rooms. It was supposed to be a 45 minute discussion. I’ve been in those rooms for two to three hours and at least an hour of questions in those discussions, and what I’ve learned is that when guys start talking and they feel comfortable, they don’t stop talking.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:59

And

Dr. Amy Pearlman 19:00

that’s a beautiful conversation to see. I think it’s also been very important for me not to be their mommy up on stage, right? So let me give you another example. I’ve had guys raise their hand and say, Well, Dr Perlman, what is the impact of cocaine on erectile function? There are so many different ways I could answer that question, right? I could easily say, Don’t do cocaine, which is probably a good response. But what I said was, so remember, I showed that slide on how erectile function happens and the importance of this blood vessel opening up to allow for more blood flow. Darn. Unfortunately, cocaine is a vasoconstrictor, and it closes off the blood vessels. Next question, right? And all I need is for that information to marinate a little bit. Another question I was asked Dr Pearlman, what is the impact of vaping on erect. Malfunction? Well, that’s a really good question, and there’s not a lot of research in that field, but what I will say is this, I know what nicotine does. Unfortunately, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Next question, you know what I’m saying, and so I what I don’t know from that work is I don’t know if it actually changed behavior. But at the end of those sessions, I would ask, I want to hear from you all, what changes are you going to make based on today’s discussion starting tomorrow? Just out of curiosity, and I remember one kid raised his hand. I actually did this session with my sister. This is at a university in South Florida. One kids. Kid raised his hand and said, I’m going to incorporate cardio in my resistance training program. Because all I had said during the discussion was that cardiovascular exercise can be just as effective as something like Viagra for improving erectile function. That’s all I needed to say. A very simple message,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 21:03

you have everyone’s attention. Most people, and even in the online space, where there is a plethora of information, are talking about things like, how to get bigger muscles, how to get leaner. I don’t think I have ever had a doctor talk about what vaping does to erections, or even, as you say, the elephant in the room, which is a woman talking about sexual health, penis health, but beyond that, something like cocaine and erections when we think about where we are right now. Many people struggle with obesity, many people struggle with elevated levels of insulin, problems with sleep. As a urologist who is trained in sexual health, where do you start when it comes to addressing these things?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 22:00

Yeah, I would say that is my biggest challenge, Gabrielle, because everything has to be addressed, because not one of the examples that you just provided is more or less important than the other. But I have to begin where the patient feels comfortable, and I’ll give you an example. I was just seeing a patient yesterday, and I recommended, by the end of the visit that he see about five different specialists. That is very overwhelming for this gentleman. And I asked him, I said, Do you want me to have them reach out to you? Or would you like to reach out to them to schedule an appointment? And it was kind of just like too much for him, right? And he said, Well, let me reach out, and I’m giving him space for that, even though I know he would benefit from seeing a sleep specialist and a sex therapist and a preventative cardiologist, I can’t overwhelm him, because then he’s going to do none of it right. But what I like to do when patients come into my office is I like to kind of start with some of those things that you described before I go into the sex because for a lot of the patients that come in, I cannot expect them as a complete stranger to them, for them to verbalize things oftentimes they’ve never verbalized before. And so what I will say is, before we get into the reason for today’s visit, I just want to get a lay of the land in terms of your overall health. Is that okay? And I think people like that, because oftentimes we’re rushing people in the office. We want them to get to the point, from the get go. And I’m like, wait a second. Let’s take a breather here. Do you have a primary care doctor any chronic medical conditions? And then I’ll list them, right? Because some people will just kind of like, spew it out, and other people don’t realize that their high cholesterol is a chronic medical condition. We go through allergies, we go through all those things, and then once I develop that rapport, then we’ll go into the sexual health topics, but in that discussion of overall health, as a urologist, believe it or not, I asked, walk me through a day of what you eat. And not everyone is prepared to answer that question, because they didn’t think I was going to ask, right? And it’s funny, because a lot of people will say, I eat healthy, and I say, what do you eat for breakfast? What do you eat for lunch? How do you get your protein? How many grams of protein how many grams of protein do you think you’re gonna get in a day? And I would say this conversation is good and bad. It works in my clinic, because I give people the space and the time, but in most healthcare settings, there’s no way I mean that question alone, what do you eat in a day? Would take up an entire visit in a typical urology visit, right? But I ask about nutrition. I ask about protein, I ask about exercise resistance, cardiovascular and I screen them for sleep apnea without them knowing I’m screening them for sleep apnea, because a lot of my patients are averse to getting tested, so I kind of sneak those questions in there.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 24:54

You come from a place that you have very unique training you were exposed to. Urology early on in your career, Dr Larry lip Schultz, who is, if the listener has not seen he’s been on the podcast. How did that inform? Because we’re getting to sex, and also, as one of your five S’s, steroids was on,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 25:18

there

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 25:19

another very taboo topic. Where do we begin the conversation around steroids and sexual function?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 25:29

Yeah, you can’t have one without the other, and that’s why, when someone comes in and they have sexual function concerns, I always ask, have you ever had your testosterone level checked? But that’s not even enough, because oftentimes my patients will say, yeah, and they say, but I was told it was normal, and I say, Can you give me the result? Any idea what that number actually looked like? Because context is everything, and numbers tell a story, but they don’t tell the entire story. And normal is doesn’t really mean anything to me. It means nothing. And what I tell my patients too, especially for you know, a lot of our mutual patients, or patients at UC and I see they have a whole host of labs. And what I don’t think patients realize is that when a lot of doctors order labs, we are not actually looking at the numbers for a lot of those labs, we’re looking for the highlighted numbers, the ones that quest or lab core told us were abnormal. We’re looking for the highs and the lows. And the problem, especially with testosterone, is the reference range is huge, right? It could be 250 to 1000 so if a 25 year old has a level of 300 that’s not going to flag, but 300 is not normal.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:46

What is normal for a young man? Yeah,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 26:55

in my clinic, there is no normal, right? In my clinic, I ask myself, how could I hurt this person if I treated him and that the safety aspect and defining the answer to that question is the most important question I have to answer. For example, if someone comes in and he’s 40 years old and his testosterone level is in the four hundreds, right? Most people would say that he has a normal testosterone level and wouldn’t benefit from testosterone therapy. But over my career, I’ve seen many 40 year old men that had levels of testosterone in the four hundreds that were started on testosterone therapy, and they’ve come in and they’ve told me, I want to be supervised by a physician. I know I never had legitimately low levels, but I’m telling you that I thrive when I’m on testosterone. Will you continue my hormone therapy? There are a couple different ways to respond to that, right? One would be, well, get off testosterone. We’re going to recheck your levels in three months, and if you’re low, I’ll continue your therapy,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:08

which is, by the way, the standard way that physicians are trained,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 28:13

and I know that man is going to then suffer for three months. What’s the worst thing that happens if I continue his therapy. And that’s one thing you mentioned Larry lipscholtz, that’s one thing that I’ve learned, one of many things that I’ve learned from Larry, which is, if I say no to help this person, they’re gonna do it anyway, just under no supervision, right? And so I welcome a lot of those guys into my clinic, and I say, Well, how can we do this safely, and how can I continue monitoring you, right? But so I don’t have a cut off now, if someone comes in and their levels are in the seven hundreds or eight hundreds, right, I’m gonna look at their free testosterone, because sometimes in those guys, their total testosterone is very normal, but maybe their SHBG is on the higher side of normal, and maybe their free testosterone is on the lower side of normal. So there are some patients there where I’m going to put on testosterone therapy. It’s very context dependent. Let’s take, let’s say we take that same 40 year old and he, let’s say, is interested in having kids, right? He’s interested in either current or future fertility. Well, Gabrielle, that’s how I could hurt him, because I can wipe out the sperm in his ejaculate in a very short period of time. What

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 29:20

is the percentage of and they don’t typically use just to be clear, doctors are not utilizing testosterone replacement therapy or testosterone for birth control,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 29:32

right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 29:32

But it can, and the numbers are pretty profound, it can really reduce spermatogenesis, yes.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 29:40

And you know, especially with like these longer acting formulations, like the injectables versus like the daily formulations, and they’re doing a study right now, actually, at Baylor with Dr kira’s group, where they’re looking at putting patients on oral testosterone. They’re using Kaiser tracks, and they’re looking at sperm parameters to see if on these doses, they’re putting. Patients on if it can preserve fertility in these patients, which would be huge. Because really, in our AUA guidelines, the American neurological Association, you know, our guidelines say that if someone is interested in current or future fertility, we should not consider testosterone. But I’ll tell you, this is a very gray zone, something also that I’ve learned from Larry lip Schultz, which is, if someone is, let’s say, interested in future fertility, and he’s 35 and he’s really struggling and has low testosterone. Why would I not treat him with testosterone? Make him suffer potentially 510, years until he builds his family, until I treat him, there are ways that we can still help this guy, right? And your prior podcast guests have discussed this as well, cryopreservation, so freezing sperm, you know, we can put them on HCG at the same time as they’re on testosterone therapy, or potentially with oral testosterone, right, where, at certain doses, maybe we can preserve their fertility as well. That’s the art of what we do in hormone replacement

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 30:54

therapy. It is arguably the most interesting aspect of medicine from my perspective, is this, I don’t want to say it’s largely untapped, but getting into this area of analog agents is where the future has to lie, especially with the use of GLP ones. We have to be able to bring these to the forefront which other groups or other populations have utilized there in wasting in HIV treatment. Physicians use analog agents because it helps save lives. It saves their life. The idea of utilizing testosterone when someone’s levels are, quote, normal, there’s no difference in terms of cut off, right? We’ll say, Okay, if your testosterone is 250 for a 21 year old male versus an 80 year old man, right? There

Dr. Amy Pearlman 31:56

are no age based cutoffs.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:59

How does that make any it makes no sense, to

Dr. Amy Pearlman 32:04

be clear, it makes no sense.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:05

But that informs our ability to treat

Dr. Amy Pearlman 32:09

right, well. And the other thing too is, and maybe it doesn’t matter either, maybe that’s the thing, right, because an 80 year old with a level of 300 or let’s say, even like 400 might benefit just as well from testosterone as a man who’s 50 who has a testosterone level of 400 what are the risks of having low testosterone? So we know that low testosterone is a risk factor for heart disease, which is interesting, because a lot of people are concerned about being on testosterone and that risk for causing things like heart attack and stroke. And I know your episode with Dr mo Kir really delved into this with a traverse trial. And so this recent evidence is informing us that testosterone therapy does not increase risk for things for heart attacks and strokes. Now it’s important to keep the following consideration in mind is that the traverse trial use topical formulations. If you were to ask me, Amy, what formulations of testosterone do you typically use in practice for your male patients, I rarely use topicals. The two most common formulations I use are oral testosterone and injectable testosterone, and I tend to dose people a little bit higher, right? So our AUA guidelines, would you know, would say, okay, get someone within, let’s say 450, to 600 range. I routinely have patients that are higher than that range in the traverse trial. The goal was getting people to like 350, to seven hundreds in terms of testosterone. So can I say that the cardiovascular safety of testosterone with oral or, sorry, with topical therapies is this has the same safety profile as, let’s say, testosterone cypionate, where I’m getting levels at 1000 or 1200 I can’t say that. I cannot. But what I can say is this, testosterone injections have been around for about 50 years. Actually, they came out the same year. This is interesting that the Sony Walkman came out. They’ve been around for a long time. So if they increase risk for heart attack and stroke, we would have seen it by now, right? And testosterone injections are the most commonly used formulation of testosterone therapy worldwide. So we would have seen it in your practice, in my practice, and in studies.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 34:33

I like what you said about what is going to do harm to the patient in informing these decisions, what level of testosterone Do we believe, or does the literature show would be harmful?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 34:47

Yeah, we don’t know. We don’t know, but we look at the downstream effects, right? And there is a Morgenthaler

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 34:54

was on a podcast. Yeah, he’s

Dr. Amy Pearlman 34:56

so awesome. I mean, he is just a. Wealth of knowledge that completely changed the landscape of how we think about testosterone. And he was on a panel at one of our society meetings, I would say, about maybe four years ago. And the question for this panel was, is super physiologic dosing of testosterone dangerous? So he was saying that it’s not and there was another one of our colleagues that was saying that it is dangerous. The thing is, it’s a data free zone, right? There is a theoretical concern about high levels of testosterone.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 35:36

What would that be? Oh,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 35:37

let’s say like 1200 1300

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 35:40

the mechanism by which people would be concerned is it hemoglobin, hematocrit,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 35:46

right? So that’s what I’m looking at, right? And so if we look at the downstream effects of raising someone’s testosterone, it’s going to be their hematocrit. So because we can increase the thickness of their blood, it’s going to be estrogen. It potentially could worsen sleep apnea. So that’s why I’m screening all these patients for sleep apnea, and then I check their lipid panels, because in some circumstances, it might raise LDL and lower HDL. So I’m tracking all the potential downstream effects. So I don’t really worry about the testosterone level in and of itself.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:20

It is an important point, and it really is nuanced in, you know, one hand, I’m thinking about your young, 25 year old patient that are coming in, and maybe they have been misguided, maybe they have utilized anabolic steroids, and I use the word anabolic steroids very specifically here, as opposed to, oftentimes, I’ll refer to anabolic agents.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:44

It

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:46

is a different environment when someone is using a medication for performance enhancement outside of the over oversight, say, as a physician, and then, of course, there are some agents that are are illegal. But in the gym bro landscape, I don’t know how else to say it, there is a potential for abuse. And in any sport, right, there is a potential for steroid abuse. Maybe part of that comes from we don’t have a lot of good studies or data. Would that be fair to say, for example, some of the other black market anabolic agents that people are using to build muscle again when they’re young, which can then affect their fertility. And where I’m going with this is that that, in my mind, is the same conversation as saturated fat got a terrible reputation saturated fat. Do you know where that reputation came from? Amy, no, okay, let me tell you a story. Let me tell you. Tell me a story. Saturated Fat got that reputation during war times when they were hydrogenating whale blubber so that people had enough calories to not starve

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:14

to death.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:15

It hydrogenated whale blubber was not intended to be used, for example, for 30 years, it was a short term fix for an immediate problem starvation, which then changed the entire way the medical community thought about saturated fat. The lay person thought about saturated fat, how our guidelines are at 10% saturated

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:46

fat,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:47

hydrogenated whale blubber is different than, say, saturated fat that you might find in red meat, similarly that anabolic steroids that are not available for off label use or FDA approved use that an individual may take to build muscle or enhance performance is different. You know, maybe it’s used in horses or animals, is different than FDA approved anabolic agents testosterone that are studied in humans and that are utilized for specific conditions.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:32

Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:33

And girl, that was a long story to get to the point, but like you said, context is everything. Yeah, as we have these young guys going out, or young ladies going out and using these anabolic agents that perhaps are not even used in the US, and then that affecting fertility and are laced with other types of use gets translated over. To a testosterone of 1200 is dangerous. What I’m understanding from you is that these things are not the same.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 40:10

They’re the same and they’re very different. You know, a lot of the bodybuilders will use the same medications that I use in clinical practice and that you use in clinical practice, right? They’ll use HCG, they’ll use Clomid, they’ll use in Clomiphene, they’ll use testosterone, incipinade. The doses are oftentimes different, right? Bodybuilders might use up to 10 times the doses that I would ever use in clinical practice. And because they’re driving up the testosterone level so high, they oftentimes need estrogen blockers and HCG, you know, to cycle on and off with, but they’re also stacking them with a lot of other things, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:44

That’s the key.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 40:45

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:46

they are stacking them potentially with other things,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 40:48

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:50

and anabolic agents, sex, testosterone has gotten a really bad rap,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 40:55

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:56

because of the misinformation of and it’s not even misinformation. It’s the assumption that that’s what we’re only talking about right. Things like HCG, things like in clomaine, things like testosterone, when there are other agents that, you know, I’ve had patients come to me that had been taking echo voice.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 41:17

I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 41:18

mean, these are, these are not available for human use or various agents like that and that, in my mind, we don’t know what the effect on cardiovascular health is, but that is not the same as a testosterone level that is, again, from my perspective,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 41:39

no, I would agree. So I don’t freak out when I see a level of 1200 right? I sit down with the person and I say, How are you feeling? Right? I mean, I’ll have guys that come in, let’s say I put them on a starting regimen of, let’s say 100 milligrams of tests, or 100 milligrams of testosterone a week, and I’ll see them back with labs. And let’s say their testosterone level is 700 right? And they feel better, but they say, but I wonder if I can feel better better, right? I would guess that a lot of people would say your level is in the target range. That’s awesome. But again, I go back, and I ask myself, but maybe this person would feel better at a little bit of a higher level. And again, what’s the worst thing that could happen, right? But I’m looking at his estrogen, I’m looking at his hematocrit, I’m tracking his symptoms, and oftentimes I’ll offer to go up on the dose, and oftentimes those patients will feel better at slightly higher doses, and I’m not hurting him, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:34

And that’s a really important point for, I think, physicians to hear, and also people, how do we know how high to go?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 42:44

Yeah, typically, the maximum dose that I would use total in a week would be 200 milligrams for testosterone cypionate. Now, when I put people on the oral medications like kaisotrex, we know from the studies that about 75% of men will end up on the highest or second highest dose anyway, once you titrate them. So I oftentimes actually start those guys on the highest dose, just from the get go, you know. But I’ve gotten levels up to, let’s even on the oral testosterone agents, sometimes up to 1800 but again, context matters. I know their levels are not always at 1800 right? Their levels peak three to five hours after they take oral testosterone. So the other times of the day, it’s lower than that, you know, and that’s why they tend to have, actually fewer side effects with the oral agents. But I just don’t get scared of the numbers. But just part of that is just listening to conversations with a Morgentaler. And in some of the podcasts that I’ve done, I like to I bring experts on where I’m like, Okay, I know you were on the guidelines. I know what the data tells us and what the guidelines say, but take me. Take me into your clinic. What are you doing? What do you worry about? Right? That’s where I’ve learned the most, is when I just sit down with the experts and I’m like, What are you worried about? What’s the worst thing that could happen? That was actually a conversation I recently had with Larry lipscholtz on peptides, right? And I said, because for many years I was telling people, you know, no, I don’t like I’m not gonna do peptides. I don’t know where to like source them. There’s no evidence to support their use. I don’t think it would be helpful. Just take your testosterone. And I sat down with Larry, and I said, Larry, how long have you been prescribing peptides for? And he said, three to five years. And he runs a very busy clinic, very busy. And I said, so you have at least hundreds of patients on peptides. Is that right? He said, Yeah. I said, What’s the worst thing that you’ve seen? He said, some injection site reactions. I said, that’s the worst thing that you’ve seen. And I think about all these medications that we put people on that are FDA approved, used on label

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:44

NSAIDs with

Dr. Amy Pearlman 44:45

way more implications on side effects, right? And I would argue that testosterone therapy, when prescribed at clinically appropriate doses, is one of the safest medications we can put people on. One. Of the safest you’ve asked before, what are different medication interactions with other medications? I can’t think of a single medication that interacts with testosterone where I couldn’t put them on it isn’t that crazy. There are very few other medications we can say that for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:18

it is crazy and it is even crazier, how misinformed people are. If a 25 year old had been abusing anabolics. Is there hope for recovery?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 45:35

Yes, there is hope for recovery. And here’s the problem, here’s where we have kind of a data free zone. Is a lot of those young men that may have been abusing anabolics never had their baselines checked, so we don’t know what we’re trying to recover them to. So when I was doing these educational sessions with the fraternity guys,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:59

they

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:59

invite you back. Yes. Did you get any dates? They’re a little younger. Yeah, that’s true.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 46:05

But um, oh, and I ended up, actually, as part of this initiative, I educated the men’s basketball team at Iowa. It was so funny. I was so I was invited to their practice. And so I’m watching these men who were, like, six feet, eight inches, playing basketball, like sweating because I’m thinking, oh my god, I’m going to be educating these guys in a few moments. And so we went into their film room, a beautiful room. There are 15 dudes, you know, sitting in the room, and it was fabulous, like they wanted to know this information too, right? But here’s, here’s the message. Here is we have to engage these young men. We can’t poo poo them, right? I understand they want to gain muscle. That’s fabulous. I want everyone to gain muscle. How do we do it safely? We check their baseline, right? We don’t say you don’t have a place in our healthcare system. We say, Bill, come on in. Have a seat. I know you’re going to do this regardless. How can we do it safely, right? So let’s talk about how we do it safely. We check their baseline hormones, right? We check their testosterone, we check their estrogen, their hematocrit, what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:06

about sperm health?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 47:07

And we check their sperm health. That is a big key, right? Because if someone is coming in, let’s say they’ve been on testosterone therapy, and let’s say they were doing it outside of the healthcare system, and now they want

Speaker 4 47:18

to have a

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:19

child do it out of the outside of the healthcare system, because if someone comes to their goes to their doctor and says, I’m 25 and, you know, as I think about this, I have had patients that are very young, and they’re like, I feel terrible. Their testosterone is low, and I it was very early on in my practice, I didn’t feel comfortable treating them, and they had been to endocrinology, yeah. And the endocrinologist, I mean, this, this one patient, he had a testosterone 180

Dr. Amy Pearlman 47:48

Oh my gosh.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:50

He was in his mid 20s,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 47:51

yeah. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:53

the endocrinologist was afraid to treat him with testosterone,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:57

yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:58

So these guys, obviously, because the system is broken and because we’re just not educated routinely in men’s health, like you’ve pointed out, where do they go? Yeah, they go to the gym or their friends or online now,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 48:14

yeah. And here’s the thing, we oftentimes talk about the implications of treating someone and the potential side effects, we don’t talk about the implications of not treating someone. That’s what I worry about for that guy in his 20s, the implications of leaving him as a 25 Year Old At 180 for potentially what one or two decades of his life,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 48:38

cardiovascular,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 48:38

cardiovascular, bone density, right? His the way that he feels when he wakes up and goes about his day, his sleep, his, you know, his bone health, muscle health, all of those factors. That’s what I worry about, right? So the issue is we have not been taught how to help men in their 20s and 30s. We poo, poo. Them. They come in, they say, I’m concerned that my orgasm isn’t as pleasurable as it used to be. I’m concerned my ejaculatory fluid looks a little different. I want to know how often I should be having sex. Is porn bad, right? What do you think about marijuana and sexual function? And it’s easy to say, no, no, no, no, no to all of those things, right? It’s easy to say, Oh, you’re 20 years old and you have Ed Well, go see a sex therapist. We have not helped that person. And so why would that person come back until he has, like, a huge issue decades later? So that’s a big issue. I see a lot of guys that come in with very normal questions that we were never taught how to answer in medical school or residency. Yeah, yeah. So one would be, I’m concerned about my penile size. I ejaculate too quickly. I want to last longer, but they may not meet those standard definitions of premature ejaculation. Which is, which would be like, within one or two minutes of penal vaginal intercourse. But what if someone lasts 10 minutes, and they want to last 15 minutes, we could still help that guy, right? But if he doesn’t need that classic definition, then he’s going to be told, Well, you’re in the normal range, right? You know, how often should I be ejaculating? I mean, most providers don’t know how to answer those questions, and then our young men lose faith in the healthcare system, and that’s a huge problem, right? But baseline testing is really key. So when I was doing these fraternity sessions, I would have people raise their hand and say, Dr pelman, I’m injecting 300 milligrams once a week of testosterone, cypionate. Can I still get someone pregnant? Yeah, you can actually, because it doesn’t work as a contraceptive for everyone.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:48

What percentage does it decrease sperm production? It’s isn’t it typically at least 90%

Dr. Amy Pearlman 50:55

that’s a good question. But the problem is, we don’t test a lot of these people as baseline, right? So it’s hard to say in the doses, especially if they’re outside of the typical medical healthcare system. By the way, different

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:06

and by the way, the dose doesn’t necessarily matter. It’s the effect,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 51:10

right? Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:11

just to be clear, if someone is taking 100 milligrams of testosterone versus 300 milligrams, is it true that the 300 milligrams isn’t going to necessarily suppress it more than the 100 everyone

Dr. Amy Pearlman 51:24

responds differently. You know, same thing with testosterone levels. There are some guys where I have them on a point three, you know, milliliters of testosterone a week, and their levels get very high, you know, versus others that are in 200 milligrams a week. And I’ve learned over the years, people don’t look a certain part that you would think bigger guys need more levels of testosterone, and that’s not always the case, you know. So I think making semen analysis testing accessible to young men is really important, and that was one of my messages to these young men. Is okay. I know you’re going to do whatever you’re going to do, but if you are, think somewhat in your mind that you might be interested in fertility at some point in your future, get a semen analysis bank some sperm, you know, and now they have more at home testing technologies, which I think of as kind of like under this wearable technology heading is where people can do things in the comfort of their homes that give them data. Now, when it comes to At Home semen analysis testing, it depends on what question you’re looking to answer, because not all kits are created equal.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:28

What could we answer?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 52:29

Yeah, well, so one you could answer, there’s this really cool technology called yo, and you produce a sample at home, and you put the sample on a slide, and you look at it under like a microscope, and it and it will look at the sperm moving on your thigh. I think

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:43

just for fun, we’re gonna try.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 52:45

But so I think that’s what I would encourage young men to do, or if they want to know, okay, what’s happening with my sperm, with me being on testosterone?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:55

Yeah, that is so cool. Take a step back. Yeah, if someone is listening to this, because we’re gonna, I’m totally gonna try this, if we think about the nutritional implications of sperm. So how long does sperm live?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 53:07

So it takes like three months for sperm to mature,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:12

okay, yeah. Someone could take a yo test, yeah, at baseline before they start a diet and exercise program. The say, yeah, that’s their intervention of choice. Then three months later, potentially, I don’t know how good these slides are, they should see some kind of difference, yes.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 53:32

And I encourage people to be an n of one. They’re they can be their own experiment, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:41

Also, I’m sorry, I’m just thinking about this, because also, what about the young guy that’s using a lot of marijuana?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 53:47

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:48

that doesn’t want to believe, I’m thinking of One patient in particular. Doesn’t want to believe that the alcohol and marijuana are affecting his sperm count or sperm health,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 54:00

yeah. So what I would say to him is, be your own experiment, and not in a way that’s like patriarchal, but just be your own experiment, you know. And because I’ve had, I’ve had the, you know, men and fraternities ask me, Hey, Amy, what’s the impact of marijuana on sexual function? Hey, that’s a great question. The research would suggest that marijuana in general is not helpful for testosterone, erectile function or fertility, but some men get benefit, right? And so yeah, maybe the research shows that in general it’s not good, but maybe for gym it is, and that’s important to know, right? So I love this space of at home, real time technologies. Now the important thing to keep in mind when it comes to semen analysis testing is semen analyzes are also a very crude measurement of fertility, right? And they can change drastically from one day to the next. So I. Don’t look at one analysis and say, This is your health. We get a couple of them and we trend it right. So these at home technologies. What I will say is this is they are good for screening, they are good for accessibility. They are very cost effective. But if I need to answer a clinical question, like

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:21

someone’s fertility,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:22

right?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 55:22

And if someone is, like, actively going through fertility, or they want to freeze as much sperm as possible. For the future, I’m not going to be using an at home kit. I’m going to send them to a facility so that they can get this, you know, the semen analysis, they can look at it under the microscope in real time and really give me all of those parameters. So I think the at home technology is really good as a screening tool

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:46

or a Good Friday night.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 55:47

Yeah, exactly. It’s fun. It’s fun, right? And like these yo kits are less than 100 bucks, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:53

for something significant like fertility, yeah, you’re saying go

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:58

if

Dr. Amy Pearlman 55:59

it’s gonna change my clinical management. If someone is like on testosterone, is not actively looking to have a child, but wants to know, hey, what is the impact of my testosterone regimen in terms of my swimmers? Do an at home test, and you can get a general idea of what’s happening, right? Do you see any sperm? Is there any sperm available? Right? And I think that those are good. It’s all about data points, right? You can’t trend what you don’t measure. People love data, especially men. Men love data. This is a way, I think, to engage them earlier on, what 20 year old wouldn’t be interested in looking at their sperm under a microscope,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:34

and I’m already interested what’s next,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 56:38

yeah. So the other aspect that you’ve also mentioned on some of your podcasts. You’ve asked about the role of ultrasound in looking at penile blood flow. And I don’t know if that question has been answered yet, the way that you want it answered. And maybe I don’t know, do you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:54

I mean, I’m just so entertained right now that you could be talking, I don’t know, talking about the marshmallow man, yeah, because

Dr. Amy Pearlman 57:01

you’re looking for a way to objectively assess penile tissue health, is that where you’re you’re getting with that right, much like a an echo, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:11

How? Why is it that we can look under ultrasound the quality of our thyroid, the functionality of our heart? How can we use these tools to also not discriminate against our sexual function, or, you know, sexual parts.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 57:28

Yeah. So Doppler ultrasound is a very commonly performed ultrasound of the penis, but it has its limitations, and so, like in my clinic, I don’t even do penile Doppler ultrasound, because it doesn’t change my management. It’s not wrong. It’s in the guidelines. A lot of my a lot of my colleagues, will use penile ultrasound. But here’s what is important, to consider

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:51

blood flow,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 57:52

looking for blood flow, or as part of evaluation for erectile dysfunction. But here’s the thing, when you put an ultrasound probe on the penile vessels, you get a baseline, you know, velocity of the blood flow, right? But that’s not the test. The test is you inject a very powerful medication into the penis, usually something like tri mix, and you see how the body responds, right? So what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:20

ways that? Yeah, what is that

Dr. Amy Pearlman 58:22

tri mix? So it’s a combination of medications that increase blood flow to the penis. So it’s papaverin, alprodil and phentolamine. Okay, it is very powerful. It’s the most powerful medication we have to induce erections. So what does that tell me? It tells me how a person responds when I inject a very powerful medication into their penis, but if that person doesn’t normally inject that very powerful medication into their penis, it’s not replicating their erections when they’re at home. And the chairman of Urology when I was at University of Pennsylvania training for residency, Alan Wien was talking about, of course,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:03

your own team. Of course, for you guys to don’t know, Ivy League, it all makes sense now.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 59:12

So he was talking about testing, right? And specifically, he was talking about urodynamic testing, which is a test that we can do to assess bladder function

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:22

sounds like a good but

Dr. Amy Pearlman 59:24

he said, Look, if we get a test and it doesn’t replicate the patient’s symptoms at home, it’s a worthless test, right? So if my patient isn’t injecting tri mix at home,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:35

they’re not right? Do they do? Does anyone for erectile dysfunction or erection challenges. You think about testosterone? Yeah, you think about Tadalafil or a vasodilator? Does someone also utilize?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 59:50

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:50

so this

Dr. Amy Pearlman 59:51

is a medication they would also inject themselves at home, right? But if I’m talking to a patient and he says he has some erectile function issues. Let’s say I give him a script for Tadalafil or Cialis, and he takes it, and he says that he now gets great erections. He’s telling me, without me even having to do an ultrasound, that his body is responding normally, right? If I give someone a prescription for tri mix, and he says he gets rock hard erections. He’s telling me his body responds normally. So in my practice, I don’t really see that test in the office as giving me great information, although some people like to see the data and they like to see the numbers, so I get it right. How

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:31

else would we image if we were to image the genitalia, what is it that we would be looking for? I in my mind, it would be blood flow. Are there other structural components that we would just again, as in any organ system that we would be looking for?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:00:48

So an ultrasound would also be commonly used for guys who are coming in with perones,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:53

which is, which

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:00:54

is scar tissue in the penis, kind of like a lump, bumper curve, and so

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:58

hold on, yeah, I’ve had so many patients. Again, urology, you know, obviously a fellowship training position here. People ask a lot about peronis, but they don’t ask about it directly, yeah. What is perrones? How does someone know that they have it? What does it look like?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:01:17

Yeah. So oftentimes, people with peronis will come in and they’ll say they woke up one day and their penis looks different. There’s a curve in the penis. It’s not as long as it used to be. But also, what I find is guys who, let’s say they don’t have any issues when they have an erection, like their penis is still straight, but you can feel scar on exam

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:38

and which can

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:01:39

impact erectile function.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:40

And does this come from having sex with a with a not fully erect penis? Is it because, potentially, there are vascular issues? What I mean? What is the how does someone get prunes? Yes.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:01:56

So if someone is having sex with a partially erect penis, it’s going to put them at higher risk of a flexion injury, right? But think about what the penis goes through over its lifetime. It’s in a boxing ring, right? And even though we don’t think, even though we don’t think about sex as being traumatic, for a lot of people, it essentially can undergo these micro traumatic events. And if you think about if you like, cut your arm, or someone cuts their arm, everyone heals differently. Some people you would never have known that they hurt themselves, because they’re you can’t even see their scar. And other people develop keloids where it’s a very obvious scar on their arm. It’s the same thing that happens with the penis. Some people can have a micro, traumatic or traumatic event of the penis, and he’ll totally fine from it, and others won’t. The problem is, as healthcare providers, we expect that our patients will bring up concerns of theirs that are relevant, and oftentimes, our patients will expect that we are going to bring up the relevant concerns. And what happens? Nobody brings up the concern or it’s interesting. Same thing in the testosterone, the erectile function space. You know? The reality is a lot of people think that urologists love talking about all the topics that we’ve discussed so far. Gabrielle, the minority of urologists care about this conversation

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:20

also figure out how you became interested in it. It’s, you know, just over at a party. I mean, just random Yeah, implants. I mean, it’s kind of not the typical yeah route. There are not that many female

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:03:36

yeah

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:36

urologists, period, yeah,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:03:38

it makes

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:38

sense. And then there are not that many female urologist trained in sexual health?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:03:43

Yeah, and I’ll tell you, the reason why I think a lot of urologists don’t care about testosterone is because we will never operate on someone who has low testosterone to treat that. There’s no surgical intervention for low testosterone and as urologists, we are trained as surgeons.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:05

So we have to pause here, because for those individuals who are not in health care, there are two types of doctors, yeah, to be fair,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:04:15

yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:15

There maybe there are three. There are surgeons, and then there’s everybody

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:20

else a

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:22

urologist is a surgeon,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:04:23

right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:25

And I think that that is an important distinction. And surgeons, they operate,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:04:29

yeah. And so when we’re in training for five to six years, do you think we want to be in clinic talking to patients? No, you would rather be in

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:41

the or

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:04:41

we want to be in the or with a scalpel in our hands. And the times that we are in clinic, oftentimes, like in my training, I did very good training, but most of the clinics I was in were cancer clinics, where we were talking to patients about bladder cancer. Pros. Cancer and kidney cancer. It was rare that I was in a clinic where we spoke to guys about testosterone, and I think it’s similar in the menopause space. Mary Claire haver talks about this too, right? Which is a guy comes in, he’s middle age, or a woman comes in and she’s middle aged and she’s complaining about all these vague symptoms, feeling fatigued, can’t lose weight, sleep is poor, can’t build muscle. It’s like the tail of the middle aged male or the tail of the middle aged person, right? And as a surgeon, that’s a lot of complaining. We just want to look at an image, see that there’s a problem and fix it. So I think by default, it’s a very uninteresting thing for us. In fact, I hate it when patients came in with low T symptoms, and part because I thought I was going to kill them with testosterone. And even though our testosterone guidelines from the AUA

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:06:00

are

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:06:00

very good. They’re also a bit overwhelming, in all honesty. And I can say that even as a urologist, because when you look at the chart of all the different ways that we can treat someone who has low testosterone, it’s like two pages of all the different formulations. And even within those formulations, there are huge dosing ranges where you could do 50 to 200 milligrams once to, you know, every two weeks, you know, once a week to every two weeks. And so you look at it and you say, So, where do I begin? And then you don’t even want to start because you don’t know if you start low, do you start medium? Do you start high? You know, which formulation do you choose, even within the gel population, right? And so it becomes a little overwhelming. And it wasn’t until I was at the University of Iowa and was directing the Men’s Health Program. This was my first year on faculty, and I realized that people were coming to me expecting that I was the expert and I wasn’t the expert. And I realized I need to become the expert that they expect me to be. And so I went where they tell us not to go. Where do you think I went for information?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:18

I could come up with quite a few places, but the internet,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:07:24

yeah, I went to Facebook,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:25

okay?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:07:26

And I joined a closed testosterone replacement therapy support group, and I read posts from men and women all over the world, telling me, not me personally, but sharing their experiences, their protocols, what worked and what didn’t. And I learned that a lot of my a lot of people that were on topicals felt better on injectables. I was like, great. I just learned probably what would have taken me 10 to 20 years of clinical practice to learn just by reading Facebook posts

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:08:00

after doing a training at UPenn,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:08:04

yeah, UPenn and then fellowship. But the thing was, I didn’t see enough patients that were coming in for low testosterone in those clinics.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:08:11

Also, it’s, you know, it’s not what people are thinking about,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:08:17

yeah, well, and I didn’t see the follow ups, right? So in training, we see patients at one static point in time we happen to be in a clinic. We see them. It could be they’re coming in initially with these concerns, but it’s rare that we are actually going to be in clinic the next time that they’re seeing us in clinic, three months later, we’re in someone else’s clinic or we’re in the operating room. So we never know if we help that person. So for the first time, really, when I was on faculty and I was seeing my own patients back in clinic, did I see the impact that testosterone could have? So I went from hating to see these patients coming in with low T concerns to looking at my schedule at the beginning of the day, seeing that I had three to five low teeth follow ups, and saying, Thank God, I at least help three to five people.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:09

Because you can solve it, because

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:09:11

I can solve it. Because what other medication can you think of out of all the medications that you’ve prescribed where we can improve the pep in their step, their energy, potentially their sleep, their ability to gain muscle, their ability to potentially lose weight, their depressive and anxiety symptoms, their erectile function, their libido. I mean, on a good testosterone replacement therapy program, you can improve all of those symptoms challenge. I wanted to can you think of another

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:45

medication

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:09:47

that can help someone in all of those aspects of their life, from the head to their toes?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:53

No, I can’t.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:09:54

I am so lucky to do.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:58

You know I can. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:00

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:02

when we think about this younger generation, because we really haven’t talked about that, you’re the first urologist. And again, the joke is, I have the number one Men’s Health podcast. What do they need to do and what do they need to think about before they or, let’s just phrase it this way, to have a healthy, I don’t want to say sex life, yeah. How to have a have healthy sexual function? Is it even sexual function? Because what you’re really talking about is overall health.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:10:39

Yeah, exactly. We’re talking about overall cardiovascular and metabolic health, and as a byproduct, their sexual health will get better. So what do these guys need to know? Well, in addition to just their normal structure and function, right? They need to know what they need to eat. And oftentimes we just tell people eat healthy. That’s not good enough. They need examples. You know, they need examples of what are good protein sources? How much protein should I eat? Right? I mean, a lot of these guys that are in their college years, they’re going to the gym, they’re super curious about what foods to eat. They want to do a good job. We need to tell them the details. Eating healthy is not good enough, right? They want to know, what supplements should I take?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:24

Talk to me about supplements, because you have very specific supplements for sexual violence,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:11:33

yeah. So I’m very selective with

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:36

supplements. What I’m asking you

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:11:37

now, what I will say is, my conversations used to be shorter because I would say I don’t recommend supplements because they’re unregulated. That’s not really a good response, right? And there’s actually a ton of research on supplements, right? I think the more impactful and thoughtful answer is number one, just make sure you’re sourcing your supplements from a good

Speaker 3 1:11:57

company before

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:58

we Yeah, but so I was doing a little research.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:12:01

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:01

on you. Obviously, I’ve known about you for quite some time, but there are certain supplements that help with no two, bioavailability and vasodilation.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:12:10

So nitric oxide supplements can be helpful, okay, and but I use them selectively, and that’s in part because most of the time, if someone comes in and wants to increase blood flow to their penis, regardless of whether or not they have erectile dysfunction issues, honestly, I will offer Tadalafil to pretty much anyone that walks into my clinic. Now, I try to get people off medications, right? I’m very I’m not anti medicine, but I want them to take the fewest number of pills to reach the goals that they’re looking for, right? And medications like Tadalafil, the way that they work is they don’t give someone nitric oxide, but when someone is aroused and they release nitric oxide, the problem is, their body breaks down the nitric oxide that they released, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:55

So, Cialis, yeah,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:12:56

so the way that Cialis and Viagra work is they prevent your body from breaking down the nitric oxide that you’ve released, right? But they’re not giving someone nitric oxide. It’s just a good differentiator, right, right? So for my patients who, let’s say, tell me, Well, I want to take something natural. I don’t want to take a pharmaceutical one, I try to debunk what natural means. The nitric oxide supplement did not grow from that tree. This is all synthetic, right? So what I like about something like Cialis is it is regulated. I know what they’re getting, right, but nitric oxide can play a role in guys who, let’s say they’re on Cialis and they’re not quite getting the benefit that they want. If I add a nitric oxide supplement, research would suggest that they will get better benefit than if they take either Cialis or the nitric oxide supplement alone.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:46

Is that from a hardness of erection or length of time of an erection?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:13:53

Oh, good question. So I think, and honestly, I think I found one study looking at combination. So it’s not you would think there would be more studies on this, but it was like one study that looked at the combination effect. And I think that they looked at a questionnaire like iief, which doesn’t really it more so acts, you know, asked about like satisfaction is very subjective measurements, you know, of erectile function. And I would say in my patient population, I see a similar, you know, result. But if someone is looking to improve their erections, I’m typically putting them on Cialis versus starting them on nitric oxide supplement, because it’s a lower pill load, right? The nitric oxide supplements, it typically requires more pills to take in a day.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:33

One side of this is making nitric oxide, which is vasodilator, which is the vasodilator, the other is maintaining nitric oxide, all for the vasodilation, for increased blood flow, two separate we have a very low threshold as well in our clinic, strong medical putting men and women on CLS, not for sex. I’m. Mean, again, it’s not for, quote, sexual health, but it is for vascular

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:15:04

health.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:15:05

You also do a number of other things in your clinic, which makes you a very popular person, because behind you in a hot pink bag, you have a variety of instruments,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:15:18

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:15:19

which it’s no again, we are making light of it, but not really. I mean, these are serious medical conditions or medical experiences for people, but you do have a bag of I’m shocked that you didn’t get stopped by TSA of an assortment of tools to help with erection, anything else. I mean, there’s, I just don’t get it wrong, because there’s erection, there’s size. I mean, I don’t want to,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:15:54

and I like to take a step back and I talk about genital health. Because even if someone, let’s say, is not sexually active and has no interest in being sexually active, we talk about their penis, and let’s say they’re clitoris too, as just another part of their body, right? And that’s where I can open up this discussion. If I have someone in my office, and let’s say a parent’s in the room, or a spouse is in the room, or a child or a friend, right? When we talk about the health of a body part, it kind of takes some of that stigma out of it, right, where we just talk about blood flow to another part of your body. So you had mentioned pretty liberal use of Cialis in your patient population, right? It’s my favorite medication right there. I mean, I have two medications that I love. One is a daily Cialis, and two, is testosterone for people that I think would benefit from it, right? Which is a lot

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:16:44

of people, just about

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:16:45

everybody, I take Cialis every day as a pre workout. I learned this from my patients. Do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:16:50

you take it as a pre workout, or do you just take it at the beginning of the day? Meaning, I’m asking for mostly myself, do you take it as a pre workout, as it helps the workouts to the half life, yeah, short,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:17:06

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:06

versus if you take in the morning,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:17:08

great question, and I don’t know the answer to that, right, I take it about 30 minutes to an hour before I hit the gym.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:15

I’m

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:16

gonna try that.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:17:17

Yeah, do I notice any changes in my workout on the medication. I will tell you No, but I’ve, when I go to the gym, I typically stop in the sauna first for a couple of minutes. And but the sauna is a new thing that I’ve been doing, so I know the sauna would probably dilate My vessels in and of itself. And so I and so I’ve kind

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:38

of,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:39

I got up you guys, and I will show you this. I got a and I don’t have a relationship with them, but I got a heavenly sauna,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:17:45

yeah?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:46

Well, number one, I’m cold all the time. And number two, we, as you see here, we work out at the house,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:53

yeah?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:53

And that is exactly how I plan to use it,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:17:55

yeah. So I just notice

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:00

because I did push ups with your sister, and I don’t know, I just, I’m glad I skipped legging.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:18:06

So I noticed when I do the sauna and I take the Cialis, my veins really dilate, and I like it. I don’t know if that impacts my workouts at all, but I don’t have any side effects from the medication, you know,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:16

hypothetically, you know. So I did my training in geriatrics. I did my fellowship at WashU. I trained in Nutritional Sciences. And one of the things that we see with aging is splanchnic extraction, is blood flow decreases. The idea that, and be interesting to see, the idea that someone would, quote, preheat the body to increase blood flow prior to training for nutrient delivery, would be a great thing to look at, because it’s so easy.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:18:46

Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, because I’ve been rethinking, if what I’m doing is actually correct,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:52

we’ll look it up. I mean, because it makes a lot

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:18:54

of sense.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:55

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:55

back to the vasodilation, the Cialis component, because of your bag of tricks behind you. I know that you’re going, Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:19:03

and

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:19:03

we’ll get into that. Don’t

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:19:04

in a very specific way, but

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:19:06

I’ve learned from my patients over the years some of the off label uses of some of the medications that I routinely prescribe. And I had these guys that were, you know, working out at the gym a lot, and they said, I like it as a pre workout. So now, and this is completely off label. But even in guys who come in, you know, who say, Yeah, I don’t have any erectile dysfunction issues, I’ll say, look, I like a daily Cialis for the following four reasons. My goal is, if you don’t want to take it totally, get it not a problem. Let me know if you’re interested in the future. But one is, it just makes erections easier, right? Two is, I’ve had a lot of my male patients say they like it as a pre workout, and I don’t know if the impacts in men are different than in women, but I tend to find that my male patients really feel the impact as a pre workout, where then they don’t have to go to some random store to get some random pre workout, they can just take the Cialis, right? Andrew Huberman did a wonderful podcast on hair restoration. In maybe a couple of years ago, and I watched it, he kind of went through all these potential therapies and the potential role of CLS as part of a hair restoration program. And my patients love hearing that. Now, do I tell them it’s going to grow your hair back? No, but I tell them, Look, it might increase blood flow to your scalp and could be part of a restoration program. And for a lot of these guys that we’re seeing are hitting their 40s and 50s, what I mentioned was prostate puberty, right? It can help them, help make them feel better, right? And so for those four reasons, I think it’s helpful. Then, what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:34

does Cialis do to the prostate? So

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:20:36

it can help relax the tissue and the prostate surrounds the urethra. So I will tell you, I have a lot of patients that don’t have any problems, right? And in our clinics, we’re used to treating problems like, What diagnosis code do you, you know, do you have? So I can put this in as an ICD 10 code, and I’ve had so many patients over the years say, okay, yeah, I don’t have any problems. Yeah. Let me try the medication. Throw it in. Let’s see what it does. And they come back and they say, Amy, I love it. And I don’t know exactly why they love it, because I’m not treating a pathology, but I just think it makes erections easier.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:10

Could it be? Which

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:21:11

is, again,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:12

prevention for piranes,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:21:14

yeah, I think so, right? Because if we can just like, why do we wait until someone has a decline in their erections, you know. And a lot of these guys, too, are poo pooed out of clinics because, you know, they’ll say, Doc, my eruptions aren’t quite what they used to be, right? We’ll say, Oh, are they surface, you know, sufficient for intercourse, and what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:33

is a normal eruption?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:21:35

Oh, that’s a good

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:37

question, right? Again, I’m like, coughing.

Speaker 7 1:21:39

Yeah. I say break. Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:41

I know. How are we on time? I mean, it’s just so interesting. Sorry, okay, you good on time? Yes, so good. It’s like, so good, because you know you were listing out what the normal the that these young college Yeah, kids don’t have answers for normal function and normal questions. Yeah, what is a normal erection?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:07

So

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:22:07

everyone’s normal is different, and that’s why I take it very seriously when someone says my erections aren’t quite what they used to be. But a common response from a healthcare provider is, you’re 60 years old, you’re not 19 anymore, but what if we could get him back to when he was 19 and had really hard erections? Why is that such a bad thing? You know, I think getting guys really rigid erections is a preventative strategy for trauma to the penis. So even in guys who have Yeah, so even in guys who have peronis, I definitely would recommend you know that those guys are on something like Cialis to prevent additional injury, but I don’t think we have to wait for a decline before we treat someone.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:49

Will every Okay, let me ask this in a Will everybody get some form of peronis, or is it really based on repetitive use without a heart erection?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:23:05

Ooh, good question.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:06

So for example, you might say that everyone will get prostate enlargement because of age,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:23:12

so not everyone will get perrones. We don’t know what the true prevalence is, because who’s asking, and if patients don’t come into the healthcare system, or they don’t feel comfortable bringing it up, they don’t know. So the prevalence ranges are so variable depending on what studies you look at, right? It’s a problem, if it’s a problem. So there are some guys who have some curvature of their penis. A lot of guys are born with some curvature of their penis. Curvature of the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:43

penis,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:23:44

which is very normal. Yeah. So for guys to be born with some degree of curvature is very normal. Just like, you know, women we’re born and sometimes we have breast asymmetry, right? The body is definitely not perfect. And perroneis is a problem if it causes pain, if it changes the shape of the penis, where it becomes, you know, difficult to have intercourse. But even in those circumstances where it doesn’t cause issues, I still think it’s important to optimize erectile function to mitigate issues in the future, right? Minimize trauma.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:17

It

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:17

makes perfect sense,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:24:19

and 20 year olds need to know this.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:20

Yeah, I mean, that’s

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:24:21

why even this discussion is part of our discussion when I’m in fraternities, right? Because we cannot just limit the discussion to safe sex, condoms and STIs, because men and women need to know that you need to have safe sex. And I don’t just mean condoms there. It means you kind of have to be careful with your genitals. It means, if you’re a woman and you’re on top, you can’t just like, go to town. You have to be careful. There are so many times men come in and they’re like, oh my god, there was some position we were doing and, you know, and then, and I hurt myself, right? And sometimes. All it takes is one scenario, and it’s important that men and women who are young know that, so they know that they need to be careful with some positioning.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:09

I never thought of that okay,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:25:11

because some of the most devastated patients I’ve ever seen in my life are men who develop pironis Because they were never taught that this could happen to them.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:22

This is that’s important, because if people are somewhat reckless with their sexual behaviors, and again, you’re not saying safe sex versus not safe sex. You mean physically, yeah, safe sex. Because that is not the same for a woman, right? She doesn’t get some form

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:25:49

of perroneous, not in that sense, right? But she could definitely have pain,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:56

of course, yes, but it might not create a lasting deformity Correct. Young guys need to know about that.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:26:05

Yeah, and importantly, that there’s something to do about it, because a lot of these distressed guys that come into clinic think that there are no solutions and we can actually fix the problem.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:17

What else do young guys need to know? Yeah, about their sexual health,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:26:21

yeah. So they need to know the impact of lifestyle behaviors, right? And we’ve kind of discussed this and thinking of themselves as their own experiment. I think that’s where I’m going to go, in my bag of tricks. If you don’t

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:34

hear about peptides,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:26:36

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:36

as well, yeah. Which you can go in your bag of tricks. But I’m afraid once you pull out the bag of tricks, no one is going to hear anything else other than the bag of tricks.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:26:46

And she wasn’t lying. I do have a hot pink bag here, guys.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:50

This is and also my producer is, like, up over here looking at this. He just, he’s he’s moved himself from behind the podium. Please tell me you did not travel TSA with a hot pink bag.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:27:03

Oh, of course, I did. Of course I did. You know when I, when I go to a lot of these conferences, I usually bring these products, and it’s so funny, I just wonder what they’re seeing when they’re looking on the other side of the screen. Actually, I went to, I was giving a presentation in Dubai a couple years ago, and thank goodness I wasn’t presenting on sexual wellness products, because I products, because I would have brought these products with me and I would have been detained. I mean, that’s like a leaf for sure. Okay, I want to talk about one of my favorite analogies. Well, one was the pen analogy. The other is a sponge analogy.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:35

And for people who are just listening, she’s holding up two sponges.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:27:40

Yeah, look at these two sponges. Tell me what you see in terms of differences. Do they look similar or different?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:48

They look different. They look similarly different.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:27:50

Okay, what do you think? What’s different about them?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:54

One, so both, for you guys who are just listening to this, they both have a abrasive surface on the top one looks like the soft, spongy part is a little more fluffy,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:28:06

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:07

and the other one looks like it’s a little you know, that you’ve used it, maybe you cooked eggs and then you used it, and now it’s all beat up.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:28:13

Yeah? So this one looks like a healthier sponge, right? The penis is a sponge.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:19

I’m never going to look

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:28:20

at it. Yeah, I know this is exactly what the penile tissue is. This surface right here that you would like scrub to get grime off of a dish. This is the tunica al Virginia. This is the tissue that surrounds the erectile tissue. This is a tissue here that engorges With blood that becomes erect during an erection. Okay? And these two sponges are different. This is a sponge that I would put under the faucet and use daily to do dishes. It’s a pretty healthy looking sponge. This is a sponge that I would put under the faucet do dishes and then say, I’m not gonna do dishes for six months. This is an unhealthier sponge. Now, if I put this sponge under the faucet six months later, it will expand, but not like it did six months before. So when we talk about medications like daily Cialis, even in someone who’s not sexually active, for example, it’s like putting the sponge under the faucet every day to preserve the penile tissue health. Because what do I see so often in terms of my male patients coming in who have erectile dysfunction, they’ve lost size, they’ve lost length and girth. So you ask, what else do these 20 year olds need to know? They need to know they need to keep their tissue healthy, they need to know that daily erections are really important for tissue health, even outside of sexual health, and they need to know how to maintain those daily erections.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:29:50

How okay somebody to have healthy penile tissue should get erections daily. Yes. How many times a day?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:30:00

Yeah, so that’s a good question, and also a difficult question to answer. Right? Research would suggest that a normal number of, let’s say, nighttime or nocturnal erections, is three to five. The problem is, who’s counting, who’s counting, right? If you ask your male patient, do you get nighttime erections? He has no idea, unless he’s waking up with an erection, right? You could ask him, do you get morning would you get morning erections? Well, maybe he’s not waking up with an erection, but maybe he had three erections during the nighttime. We don’t know, and men don’t know, right? And that’s where I want to talk about the next thing out of my goodie bag, right? And you like wearable devices and personalized medicine, and so this is essentially a Fitbit for the penis. Okay. Now, full disclosure, I am on the Medical Advisory Board for this company. The company is called firm tech.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:30:49

Firm tech just becomes extremely popular

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:30:53

because, as we discussed before, people love data, especially our male patients,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:30:59

also just how about some tools? Yes, yes,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:31:03

because right now, the diagnostic tools to assess erectile function. So we look at the questionnaires. I don’t use questionnaire.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:11

Questionnaires are terrible for any aspect. I mean, I don’t know,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:31:15

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:16

in the nutrition,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:31:17

they’re annoying, like when I have when I go to the doctor’s office and they make me fill out a questionnaire. I get so freaking annoyed, even if it’s only five questions. Why? Because there’s no space for comments, because I don’t fit within a pretty little box of a check mark, because I want to do 4.5 and I don’t want to have to choose between four or five. They’re annoying, and I feel bad, because over the years, I’ve given my patients, so many questionnaires. And then we have the Doppler exam, right? But that necessitates an injection into the penis. And then we have the ridgescan, which, you know, historically, has been considered the gold standard. What is it? Ridgescan

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:55

Regis scan.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:31:55

So you put these rings on the penis, and it’s a machine, and they go home with the machine, and it measures nocturnal erections. The problem is that machine is not readily available. Rare clinics have this machine, so most people don’t have access to it,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:11

but you do have a Fitbit,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:32:13

but you do have a Fitbit. So let me give you kind of a lay of the land in terms of this device. It has a pressure sensor and a strain gage. So the man would drop his scrotum in here are the testicles, and then he just clamps it like that, okay? And this goes around the base of the scrotum. This goes around the base of the penis. When the penis becomes erect, it pushes on the pressure sensor and it pulls on the strain gage. Those numbers go into an equation and gives me a nice little EKG. And now there’s actually a provider platform where I can log in, and if my patient gives me access, I can pull up their tracing on my computer before they walk in my office. I know what’s going on, right? So I had a patient. This was probably two months ago, come in. He was seeing me for erectile dysfunction and low

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:59

libido. How old

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:32:59

was he? Was in his he’s in his 30s. He came in and he walked in my office and said, Dr pelman, I know my erections are good. You can look up my tracings right now. I’m just concerned about my libido, because this gave him the data he needed in terms of his nocturnal erection. So this can be used, actually, during any type of sexual activity and during the nighttime

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:33:19

to tell or test the strength of the erection,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:33:23

yes. So it looks at how firm the erection is, how long it lasts, and how many he’s getting, and it gives a tracing. And we know pictures are worth 1000 words, I can look at a tracing, and within two seconds, know what’s going on with my patient. Now someone may say, Well, okay, my tracing shows that I’m getting three great erections at nighttime. Dr pelman, why can’t I maintain my erection when I’m with my partner? Well, this is also treating the most common reason for Ed, which is venous leak, right? You get enough blood flow into the penis, but the blood doesn’t stay in the penis. So this is also works as like a fancy erection ring or cock ring, where it traps the blood in the penis. So when you talk about you’ve and you’ve asked, we’ve spoken about this before, and you’ve asked your other podcast guests, what is the impact of marijuana? I would tell a patient track it, see what the impact of marijuana is on you. Or if someone says, you know, I mean, I would counsel my patients that the best thing is cut out all alcohol, right? But that’s not realistic for a lot of people. So I would say, see how much you can get away with when it comes to your rectal function. If you’re erectile function is what matters to you. Because not everyone’s going to be interested in tracking their erectile function, right? For some people, they might want to track their a, 1c or their cognitive function. But as we kind of spoke about, erectile function is a big motivator for a lifestyle change. So if this is a motivator, I would say, see what happens with your tracings when you drink two beers versus Three

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:54

versus one of a venous leak,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:34:57

it is incredibly common, right? We think about. Just veins throughout our body. We think about like varicose veins and having leaky veins. So that’s one thing. Venous leak can also happen after prostate surgery for prostate cancer. It can also happen if someone has peroneus disease. It is a very common thing. We see it even in guys in their 20s. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:16

this is a quote, compression stalking.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:35:18

It’s a compression, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:19

for venous leak,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:35:20

correct? And I have changed my terminology over the years. Oftentimes, these devices are called constriction rings. That terminology sucks,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:29

yeah, no, because she

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:35:29

wants to put a tourniquet on their penis, right? So I’ve changed my terminology to erection ring. And I think heterosexual men miss the memo. I think we forgot to send the memo out to heterosexual men. Because if you talk to men who have sex with men, they use cock rings all the time, right? Coming from a place of abundancy, not from a place of deficiency. So when I’m trying to encourage my patient to use an erection ring, I tell them the same thing, like, don’t tell your partner you want to use it because you can’t maintain your erection. Tell your partner, babe, you are so sexy, and I want you to experience pleasure for as long as possible. What do you think if I try this ring? Who’s gonna say no to that? No

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:11

one is ever gonna argue with you. I mean, there’s no way anyone else wins an argument.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:36:15

So I like devices like this because it gives men the control. It gives men the data. It’s going to encourage behavioral changes that you and I recommend all the time, but we don’t necessarily have the metrics. You know that we need to encourage those changes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:32

Does this need to come from a health care provider?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:36:35

No, that’s also beautiful. Patients can just order it online. It’s super easy. It doesn’t require a health care professional to look at the data. It’s very user friendly. It will actually compile the last several tracings and will give a patient their erectile fitness score. So it’s like an aura ring. You don’t need a doctor to interpret that data before there’s erectile dysfunction, there’s erectile fitness. So I would encourage we kind of going

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:59

back to that. Is erectile dysfunction. There is erectile figure.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:37:03

Yes, let’s come from a place of abundancy. Why wait until there’s a problem? And if you get the guy who’s 25 years old to see what his baseline function is, then you know when he’s 35 years old, if there’s a change, maybe he still has a normal erection. But if it’s changed from when he was 25 that delta is impactful. It’s the Delta, not the absolute number. So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:29

cool.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:37:30

Yeah, so and this company is currently working on one for women. Isn’t that awesome? It

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:36

is because

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:37:37

when we talk about we started this conversation with the penis is a canary in the coal mine. It tells us incredible information about underlying cardiovascular health. We know the number one killer for women is cardiovascular disease, right? We know clitoral blood flow is probably the same canary in the coal mine for women as erectile function is for men, and now we’re gonna be able to track it

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:02

so cool. It’s so cool. I definitely want to try it when it comes out for women. Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:38:09

yeah. And it also can be a fun thing in a partnership. Rather than making it a male problem or female problem. It’s like, Hey, babe, want to track something right? Let’s hack our sexual health is kind of like a fun thing to do.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:28

Listen, that’s epic.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:38:29

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:30

I love it,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:38:30

yeah. Do you want me to find any other things in my toolbox here?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:35

Totally. So good,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:38:43

should I, um, I’ll just take one out, kind of one by one and give a quick feel. Okay,

Speaker 1 1:38:48

yeah, I wonder if there’s like, well, question Is there specific you said erectile fitness, yeah, yeah, you train a muscle to get bigger, yeah, stronger. That’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:00

a great question, yeah. So how, yeah,

Speaker 1 1:39:02

purposely say, Hey, I’m dedicated 30 minutes of my day, or whatever, to, like, create an erection.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:07

It’s a really great question. We will tackle

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:39:10

that right now. Okay, so All right, let me go in this fun tool bag here. All right, have you ever seen like, a penis pump before,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:21

not in person. Okay?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:39:22

So for those of our listeners and watchers who have seen Austin Powers, there’s they pull out a penis pump in Austin Powers, this is one of the most underutilized tools, I think, in all of medicine. I want to explain why there’s a vacuum pump. Okay, a lot of people get nervous about these pumps. There are lots of ones that are available, right? So when I have patients that say, which one do you recommend? I used to tell patients, oh, just go on Amazon, go to a sex shop, get a vacuum pump. Terrible advice. That’s some of the worst advice I could have ever given. Why? Because you, if you want to get a blender, you go to Walmart, you walk down the blender aisle. There are so many options. There are cheap ones. There are fancy ones. What do we do? We either get the cheapest or the most expensive. We’re going to be pissed either way, right? Typically, maybe, like, a middle range one that’s not too fancy is going to be the ideal product, right? I was never really taught about erection pumps despite many years of training. Why? Because they’re not surgical, right? They’re a little bit cumbersome, right? And I was thinking about it more from an erectile dysfunction treatment option, where I don’t think this product has its best utility, right? Because taking out a vacuum pump before wanting an erection is a little bit cumbersome. I would say that’s a true statement, where I find the value of a vacuum pump is in restoration of the penis, is in maintaining penile health,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:40:38

which you had mentioned. Yeah, penile Wait, erectile fitness.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:40:43

Erectile fitness.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:40:44

And the question is obvious, you go to the gym three days a week, you train a certain amount of reps and sets does, is there a certain schedule or regiment for erectile fitness? Yeah.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:40:57

And, you know, the muscle that you talk about, and the muscle that I focus on? I mean, it’s all muscle. It’s different kinds of muscle, right? You’re talking about skeletal muscle, I’m talking about smooth muscle, but it’s kind of similar, right? So people say, is it, how many days a week should I get erections? Well, I do. I mean, what would be your recommendations for exercise

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:41:16

every day,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:41:16

every day? And that’s what I would say for erectile function, too, to optimize erectile fitness, right? And structure and function. So for guys that are, let’s say, getting daily erections, and maybe they’re tracking it with an erection ring, that’s great, they’re rehabbing their penis already. Okay?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:41:31

Rehabbing would imply that they’re not where it should be, or,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:41:36

let’s say, exercising their penis daily, right? Because I would agree, using the term rehab is saying that there’s some sort of pathology or issue. Now, if someone, let’s say, is not getting daily erections, and I put them on Tadalafil, and then they’re getting daily erections, great, that’s going to help preserve their penile tissue long term. But let’s say, despite taking a daily Tadalafil, or they don’t want to take the medication, or for some reason, they can’t take it, that’s where I would add an erection, a penis pump like this. Okay, very important. You wrote your book, The Playbook, right? When it comes to being forever strong, a tactical manual. And I want to give you a tactical manual, or playbook when it comes to using these devices, because I’ve had so many patients come into my clinic and they say, Doc, I got a vacuum pump. It doesn’t work. Gabrielle, these do work. I’ve had guys that say, Doc, I got a vacuum pump. It’s too painful. They don’t have to be. It’s just no one ever sat down with them to teach them how not to make it painful. So this one right here is a manual one. There are also ones that are battery powered. It doesn’t matter which one you get. I typically have patients use the manual. Key things here lubrication is your friend. It typically comes with a water based lubricant. You want to use water based because it’s very easy to wash out of this device when you’re done with its use for the day, you put lubricant on the base here of the vacuum pump. You put it on the inside of the vacuum pump canister, and you put it on the penis. Okay? It’s also very important that the person trims their pubic hair, because if the pubic hair is too long, it won’t get a good seal. I’ve had many patients where they say it doesn’t work. They never got the seal. Okay? So then you put this kind of on the pelvis, put a little bit of pressure on wiggle it around a little bit to get a good seal. This is so key. Listen to what I’m saying. Do not go to town on the lever. If it’s a battery powered one, do not go to town on the button that turns it on. Way too much, way too much pressure, way too quickly. It will be painful. You might draw a testicle into the canister. Slow.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:43:30

Will you bruise it

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:43:31

and you it can be bruise, yes, okay, you will recover, but it can be painful. Do it like this. Push this two or three times. Relax. Let blood go into the penis, do it again, right? Short repetitions. That way you will do it so it’s not painful.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:43:48

And the goal of this is increase blood flow. Yes,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:43:52

it pulls blood into the penile tissue to stretch it out. It can be a game changer, especially for guys who have lost length, they’ve lost girth. They’re not getting good erectile function, because in real time, they see their penis engorge. And you know what it tells them? I still got

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:10

it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:11

I still got

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:44:11

still got it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:12

How, if someone doesn’t use their penis, how can we expect a certain amount of shrinkage of length and girth.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:44:21

Yeah, and I think Toby Kohler mentioned this on his podcast when he was a guest on your show. I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:26

seem to do that again. I mean, just want to trust but verify.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:44:32

Yeah, I think he said it was like, it was like an inch, like in just a couple of months right now, here’s the good news, men can restore size that they’ve lost. And I have some guys that, let’s say, had their prostate removed for prostate cancer. They haven’t had erections in 10 years. And when I talk to them about penis pumps, they say, Wait, there was something I could have been doing over the last 10 years to, you know, to prevent this from happening. And I say, yes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:45:00

But

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:45:00

it’s never too early and it’s never too late,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:45:02

just like

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:45:03

yes, and some of the happiest men I’ve seen over the years were guys that started using a penis pump, and they’ve gotten some of their size back, and they’re happy people. Now I will say this Gabrielle, some of the most frustrated, annoyed patients I’ve seen over the years are ones that were never told about these devices, and they’re pissed that over the last five years, they had changes that didn’t need to occur

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:45:28

if someone is not in a relationship. Would masturbations suffice? Or is this a totally separate activity? So

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:45:38

both can be helpful, right? I think masturbation is one of the best ways of coping with life stressors. It is a dump of dopamine in our brains, right? It’s incredible. And if during masturbation they’re getting a full erection, then that’s doing essentially what this pump

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:45:54

1. So then that would be, you know, because I’m just thinking about my male patients, yeah, they would just be like, Okay, now I’m gonna do this, and then I’m gonna do that. Is this just too much? So

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:46:05

I would say, however, someone is gonna get their daily erections, whether it’s with a penis pump, Cialis, masturbation, sex is totally fine for guys that have lost size. If they really wanna see if they can expand the tissue, then I would actually encourage them to also incorporate a penis pump. Now, do they have to use this for the rest of their lives? No, I tell people like use it. Give it a good college try for three months and see what you can get when they use it on a regular basis. I don’t know that I’ve had any patient say they did not benefit from a penis

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:46:35

pump. If an individual has not lost size, will this potentially improve sizing group.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:46:40

That’s a fabulous question. That is a data free zone as well, and which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:46:45

is shocking, kind of shocking. Okay,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:46:48

here’s the thing, I think, a couple of reasons why that study hasn’t been done. Okay. One is that, as urologists, we are treating pathologies. We are not taught how to address the man that comes in that says, This is a size penis I’ve had all of my life, and I’m looking, are there different ways that I can enhance my penis? You I was never taught how to answer that question in training. I was taught how to tell people No, how to say, look, you’re in the normal range. You’re well, in the bell shaped

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:47:20

a normal range is, do we have a normal size and girth?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:47:24

Yeah. So there are averages, and the averages were based on like, a collection of 15,000 people, right? And so you can look at, like the like the flaccid and the erect girth. So I can look at a penis in my clinic, and all my patients come in, I can just know, without doing the measurements, yeah, you have a normal penis. But what’s interesting is that we enhance our bodies all the time in various ways, and just like this weight management and GLP, one discussion has become very polarizing, because we think it’s in many people, out of vanity, that they want to look good in front of the mirror. It’s okay to want a bigger penis, as long as we can do it safely, right? And so I’ve a lot of my practice has actually morphed into more of, like, a cosmetic urology practice.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:08

And there are ways to write, to enhance visually, the penis

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:48:13

visually, and like, the actual sizes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:16

right? Someone do that. So this

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:48:17

one, for example, with a vacuum pump. So we haven’t there’s not a single study I found in PubMed that will look at a person coming in with a normal sized penis without any pathology to see if this can increase their size. Is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:29

it fair to say that a normal size penis is six inches or like, is there?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:48:35

85% of men are less than six inches when erect, and that’s really important

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:42

for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:42

you. Yeah, I think that’s important. Yeah. 85% of men, their penis length is less than six inches when erect. Yeah. And sometimes I’ll pull off the pull up the graph in my office and show them that you’re well, in the normal here, you’re actually above average. That’s probably good for men to know, because they again on Saturday Night Live and all these other places I would have never known that.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:49:09

Yeah. Now here’s where it becomes a little bit tricky. Is if someone has a less than average penis, I will not bring out the graph, because I don’t want for them to feel that they’re less than average, but we will talk about ways to still increase their size. What

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:49:25

about girth?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:49:27

So girth, the average girth? Gosh, I always forget. I think it’s like three and a half. Can I look at my computer really quick? It’s funny, because this is like my world, but I don’t even remember the averages, because I just increased it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:49:40

Well. I mean, listen, no one has ever talked about that. She is doing a fantastic job. Are the cameras hot? It’s a long time for them. I just want

Speaker 2 1:49:56

to give you the cars break. No, they’re good. Trejo from being. Be fucking awesome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:00

She’s killing it. Can I have my phone? Please? Killing it. This is easily one of my favorite episodes. You too. This is like, easily one of my favorite episodes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:11

Crazy to think that there’s stuff out there.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:22

So good. Can you text Shane to see if he can pick up the kids my phone, it’s not loading. Say we’re still recording, oh, I got it. I She is killing it. I also laughed. There was one part where I laughed. I’m like, I’m sorry, that’s not

Speaker 2 1:50:50

funny.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:51

So you make a note of that.

Speaker 2 1:50:52

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:56

she is killing it. What a superstar. What’s

Speaker 1 1:51:13

it called whenever erections are too strong?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:51:17

Priapism? I You’re killing it is all I can say. This is one of my most favorite episodes ever. So good. What a suit. No, you’re such a superstar, I wouldn’t tell You if it wasn’t, if it wasn’t true. You you’re doing a fantastic job. Seriously, 10 out of 10. Oh, my god, so good.

Speaker 8 1:52:42

I so the question was average birth size, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:05

Yeah, I’m just curious, because I

Speaker 9 1:53:07

wait a second,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:16

we’re probably finishing up in around 10 minutes, but don’t call

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:19

we’re

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:53:22

just we’re just talking

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:36

about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:36

girth. You’re so good. Fine.

Speaker 5 1:53:42

Okay, you are good to go. Okay,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:48

you’ve clarified length. Now let’s talk about girth. Yeah, let’s

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:53:52

talk about girth. So the average erect girth is around four and a half inches. So most of my patients fall within the average, right? The question becomes, can I help them? Right? And I think that’s also something that men of all ages need to understand, we cannot tell this person, we cannot help you, because, again, they’re going to lose trust in the healthcare system, or they’re going to try over the counter stuff that could even be dangerous for people,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:54:15

like, what? What kind of like,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:54:17

supplements,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:54:18

yeah,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:54:18

you know,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:54:19

I’ve seen those at the gas station,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:54:21

there are some really interesting documentaries. I don’t know if you’ve seen them, talking about enhancement for the penis, but what I will tell you is it shows a very drastic side of the penile enhancement space, where it was showing one guy traveling all over the world and looking at guys that were putting these heavy weights on their penis. And there was one point to this documentary where he’s in a hotel room in front of this guy that’s about to take out this weird substance from like a Coca Cola bottle and inject it into the penis, and you see this guy that’s like, I don’t know if I should do it right. That’s not the space that I live in. I think. What’s also important

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:55:01

to me

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:55:01

a board certified year old, okay, the

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:55:05

space that I live in, and I just actually wrote this article for a UA news. And I’m so fascinated that the AUA has asked me now on two occasions to write articles for them on penile enhancement, because they’re a pretty conservative society, right? And this most recent article is talking about penile enhancement from a place of abundancy. And I’ve spoken about this abundancy theme throughout this episode, and I think that’s where we capture people and engage them, rather than poopoo them. What we’ve seen, and we did a research project on this as well is that guys that come in for enhancement are already functioning. Well, they’re not these guys that come in with what we call small penis syndrome. Okay? They’re not devastated by their penis. They’re coming in and they’re asking, what’s possible. They’re saying, Dr Amy, I know I have a normal penis, but can you safely make it bigger. Their sentiment when they’re sitting in front of me is, I don’t want to regret ever having met you. So what can you offer me that won’t lead to any regrets? Right? And so in those discussions, I talk about penis pumps, and I say, Look, if your size of your penis is the same that it’s always been throughout your adult life, then, will this be beneficial? Maybe, you know, not as beneficial as if you had lost size and were looking to restore size. It lies somewhere down a Reddit rabbit hole, right? Because there are plenty of people, both my patients and people online, that say they use a penis pump and it’s grown their penis, right? The important factor it’s not going to hurt anyone. So they can try it for a few months and see what happens, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:56:46

And they have to do it every

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:56:47

day.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:56:47

I would typically recommend every day give it the old college try. And if you don’t get any benefit after three months, then you probably don’t need it, right? As long as you’re getting daily erections, all right? The next device I want to take out is traction therapy. So this is also pretty popular online, and there are lots of different traction devices out there. And let me call out the other elephant in the room. It does look like a medieval torture. Totally.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:57:15

I was just like, Oh my gosh.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:57:18

So the man would put his flaccid penis. In this device, he would clamp down the tip of the penis like so it’s a spring loaded mechanism. He would push this out, and it will stretch the penis. Now, importantly, this device is called the restorex. It was developed by Dr Landon Trost, who’s a fellowship trained urologist out of the Mayo Clinic, one of the most amazing intelligent people I’ve ever met in my life. He does not sell snake oil, so everything that he says about this design, this device, is backed by research, which is something that I really appreciate about his message

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:57:54

and what was the impetus for creating this?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:57:58

Perrones, okay, peronis, because he was actually part of a panel, or a group of people that were writing recommendations on treating peronese disease, and he had been recommending traction therapy,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:58:11

and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:58:11

because of the scar tissue,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:58:12

because of the scar tissue stretching scar tissue Okay, and that’s why people with peronees, they develop, or can develop curves, because scar tissue doesn’t stretch Like normal healthy tissue does. And when he was delving into the research, he actually realized there wasn’t actually much research to support the use of traction. So he went to the engineers at the Mayo Clinic and said, I’d like to create a traction device, but this needs to be beneficial or show benefit with within 90 minutes or less daily use, because it requires more than that, then it’s not going to work. People aren’t going to miss it 90 minutes, right? But if you look at the other traction devices out there, people will use them for like, up to eight hours a day. You know, they might wear them all night long. So for a lot of people, that’s time prohibitive. So he came up with this device, initially to treat guys who have peronis, and the device has shown that when you use it to stretch the penis, you can also bend it in the opposite direction. It can improve curvature. He’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:59:07

a

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:59:08

percentage, so, um, which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:59:10

is not important, but I’m just curious,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:59:12

um, so what he’s so where I find this to be beneficial, right? Is in guys who notice curvature of their penis, and they don’t want to do other therapies, right? Or they’re, let’s say, in the early stages of noticing changes in their penis, and they want to minimize any additional curvature issues. Okay? Or in guys that use FDA approved medications for the peroneus disease, like Zia flex, research shows that if you combine traction therapy with injectable medications, you get more benefit than using either one alone. Would

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:59:44

someone who doesn’t have scar tissue use this if thinking about a exercise muscle, someone stretching it post training, or like yoga for the penis

Dr. Amy Pearlman 1:59:55

so they can but it’s a data free zone. The other two populations of men he studied this in is in. Men with diabetes and men who have their prostate removed for prostate cancer, who have noted penile length, length loss. So what I tell patients, again, similar to a vacuum pump, it’s a data free zone, it’s a safe therapy. So I tell them, Look, if you want to use it to potentially gain length, be your own experiment and see if you gain length. But what I found in a lot of my patients, because I do a lot of girth enhancement, is oftentimes they’ll come in, they get super excited about all of these things. They get the restore X device, and they don’t use it. And I say, if

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:00:28

it’s just big commitment.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:00:30

But here’s the thing, and this is in discussions that I’ve had with Dr TROs, who invented it, I said, Okay, so what do you tell your patients? You tell them 90 minutes a day. So he’s actually studied this. He’s looked at 30 minutes a day, 60 minutes a day, and 90 minutes a day, and you pretty much get the same benefit whether you do 30 or 90 minutes a day. So he tells his patients, 30 minutes a day, five or more days a week, for three months. If you use it longer or beyond those three months, people tend to get additional benefit. So that’s what I tell my patients. I’m not saying use this for the rest of your life, but if you are truly invested in increasing the length of your penis, then this might help you, you know, but I think it also just depends on how stretchy someone’s penis is, so it’s variable, but you can’t hurt yourself. I don’t recommend any surgeries for penile lengthening. So when it comes to interventions, I would say traction therapy is really the safest thing that we have available,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:01:21

and they do have approved surgeries for penile lengthening, right? They cut?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:01:28

Well, there are surgeries that people will do, like cutting the suspensory ligament. My concern with that surgery, and full disclosure, I’ve never done that surgery. I haven’t seen patients post that that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:01:39

is not a standard approach,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:01:40

but it would not be something that most of my colleagues within sexual medicine or urology recommend. I’m sure some people get great outcomes. Here’s what I would be concerned about and what others of my colleagues are concerned about. The suspensory ligament helps support the penis by connecting it to the pubic bone. So when it becomes erect, the penis lifts some of the most distressed patients I’ve seen in my clinic, I’ve a couple of them are ones that felt like they’ve injured their suspensory ligament, and they get erect, but they don’t feel like they have stability of their erection when they’re having sex, which makes them incredibly nervous that they’re going to injure their penis, right? So that’s where my concern is. Is the studies that I’ve seen on cutting the suspensory ligament, they don’t look at how you know the penis and how it feels supported once they do that exactly. So that’s my concern. So I tell patients, it’s a data free zone, depending on how compliant you are and how interested. Yeah, you could use you could take your daily Cialis. You can use restorex device, maybe 30 minutes a day, use a penis pump for 10 minutes a day, and do all the things and see what you get after three months. But it takes a pretty motivated patient. So I tell patients, look, if you’re not going to use it, don’t buy this, you know. But if you’re going to use it, it can’t hurt. It’s very safe, okay, so these are tool, two tools here that we know can restore size, and still to be determined if they can grow a healthy penis. Dr Landon Trejo is currently enrolling patients in Utah to actually look at enhancement. So if you’re interested, you can reach out to his clinic. You do have to go to Utah, to his clinic, but he’s comparing this actually, with some of the other first generation devices to see if it can enhance the size of the penis. Okay, next, oh, let’s talk a little bit more here about some girth enhancement while we’re on the topic. Okay, so I do filler in my office. Okay? There are no FDA approved injectables when it comes to the penis. So we use medication. That’s off label. We use hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic Acid is pretty much in the water these days, right? So we know that hyaluronic acid, when injected into the body, is extremely safe. It’s the same stuff we would put in the cheeks, in the lips, right in our nasal labial folds. So we use it off label in the penis, and we put it in between the erectile chambers and essentially the skin to increase the girth. It is incredibly safe. It is incredibly effective. It when my patients walk out after they have filler, they have a little bit more pep in their step than when they came in, right? So just like with all the other treatments we’ve discussed, like on the testosterone topic, I asked myself, how I can hurt someone? Hyaluronic Acid is 100% reversible. I don’t know of any other procedure we do in urology that is 100% reversible. I can easily, with an enzyme, dissolve the filler if I need to, right. If we look at the different sizes here, okay. So each of these is an increase of an inch. So you can kind of see the different sizes here. So when,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:04:47

if you’re if you are watching this, good for you, because this is pretty epic episode. If you are listening to this, please watch it as well. She is showing three cylinders, which. Three various sizes of

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:05:02

girth. And so when people say, when I ask them, What are your girth goals, which is one of my favorite questions to ask a lot of my patients, you would think, Okay, if you think about the typical guy that comes into a clinic like mine, you would think that they would know exactly how big their penis is and exactly how big they want their penis to be. False. Oftentimes my patients come in and they’ve never measured their penis, or they say, I’m not really sure, I think it’s this. And I say, how big do you want to be? And they’re like, I’m not really sure. I kind of want to see how it looks on me. And then we can sort of decide, or they might say, I want half an inch to an inch increase. Those are very realistic increases that we can get. Right? I routinely get people an additional inch, and sometimes even more than that, the question becomes how they want their penis to look you have the tip of the penis, you have the shafts of the penis. Some people want to maintain that contour between the two. And if the head of their penis is on the smaller side, then at some point the shafts will become bigger than the head. Right? Some of my patients don’t care. They have great girth. Sex feels amazing, and so they know that their penis doesn’t look completely natural, but sex feels so good that it’s a moot point.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:06:07

And with if I think about women, women lose collagen and volume from their face naturally as they age. Does the same thing happen to men?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:06:20

Yeah, so here’s the other elephant in the room, right? So as men get older, oftentimes their penises get smaller, especially if they have erectile dysfunction, right? If they’re maintaining their erections over their lifetime, they’re probably not going to notice any changes. But the other elephant in the room is that all of our bodies change. Right? In terms of laxity, the female bodies change, the male bodies change. And oftentimes, as we get older, the vagina probably gets a little bit looser, right? And the penis oftentimes gets a little bit smaller. How do we reconcile those things?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:06:51

Yeah, that’s definitely sounds like a problem,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:06:53

you know? And so we oftentimes talk about enhancement as a vain thing. If a guy can’t feel his partner during sex. That’s a functional thing. It doesn’t matter if his erections are amazing, if he can’t feel anything, or if she can’t feel anything, what are we doing? Right? And then I think the next sort of thing of Urology that I’m trying to tackle is normalizing this conversation of your anatomy, my anatomy, how do we optimize friction here, right? But even in the female space, it’s a very polarizing topic in terms of vaginal rejuvenation. But I think there’s a role for both of these things, right? But it’s also reason why, like, over time, people just report reduced satisfaction during sex. I see it all the time with my patients. You know, if you look at the research, the most common sexual dysfunction worldwide is reported as premature ejaculation. That’s not the most common thing I see in my clinic. The most common thing that I see when it comes to pleasure is men having difficulty reaching climax, or it takes them a long time to climax because their sensation is different. So what I hear from my patients is, once you increase their girth and they have more friction, sex feels better. That’s function.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:08:09

It’s about what I’m hearing you say is it’s there’s a component that’s just about the friction, not necessarily nerve endings, but it’s the two compartments coming together,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:08:20

correct? But also that’s going to improve, you know, the sensitivity of the nerves, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:08:25

Okay,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:08:25

so going back to this work that we’ve done, people coming in from a place of abundancy, these guys are already having sex. They feel like pretty good about their bodies, and when you help them enhance it, they feel better. They’re having more sex. Their relationships are better, but they’re not. They don’t have body dysmorphia. A minority of my patients I would consider to have body dysmorphia. So that’s on the girth enhancement side. There are plenty of follow up

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:08:51

questions on that. I post your

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:08:53

comments.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:08:54

Post your comments.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:08:56

Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the ladies.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:09:04

Totally, I didn’t know there was going to be lady toys in here. Okay,

Speaker 10 2:09:09

if you want, yeah, all the ones you use already and show back in the back. Okay, yes.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:09:25

Oh, all right. So I know a lot of your reviewers are the ladies,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:09:30

that’s

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:09:31

true. This is for you.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:09:34

You’re welcome, ladies, thank me later.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:09:37

Okay, this is what we see from the outside when we’re looking at a vulva and vagina, right? And so, like the spot, the Holy Grail, we think is this little area right here. It’s the, you know, tip of the clitoris. But the clitoris is this? Okay? This is the clitoris.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:09:54

And if you are listening to this, good luck explaining it looks like

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:09:59

a wishbone. Okay?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:10:00

Right,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:10:00

okay, women have just as much erectile tissue as men do. I’m gonna say that for the again. How this happened? Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:10:08

how’s

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:10:08

that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:10:09

possible? Yeah, this

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:10:09

is

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:10:10

all the erectile tissue. It’s just hidden. So we have no idea that it exists. It hides behind the labia, okay? And so when we tell women, and this is true, right? A lot of women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm, and you know, the majority of women can’t orgasm with penal vaginal intercourse. But I think the problem is we’ve never taught women how to orgasm with penal vaginal intercourse. A lot of women are having sex with a flaccid clitoris. So this is what I explain to my male patients, is think about how it would feel, sensory wise, if you were trying to have sex with a flaccid penis, it wouldn’t feel that good. And that’s what we’re doing to our ladies all the time, right? And so we need to engorge all of this erectile tissue in a woman for her to really enjoy the experience. So how do we do that? Well, one you got to get in there, right? Don’t just focus on this, like, get into all the nooks and crannies. I’m trying to be professional over here. You’re laughing. I say that in all seriousness, right? Is stimulate all of this area, okay, not just the tip of the clitoris, and we can use tools to help us do that. So I have people ask me, actually, they don’t really ask me, I just volunteer it, what some of my favorite products are? Okay, I love about a

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:11:34

neck massager.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:11:34

This is not a neck massager or

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:11:39

a microphone, for sure.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:11:41

This is a wand. There are so many different varieties of the wand out there. I know it’s big, feel it. It’s pretty. This is not my personal one.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:11:49

You know why it’s so funny, I didn’t even think twice about it. Okay. Oh, you want to know what I was thinking, what I was thinking. My kids are so nosy,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:11:57

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:11:57

that if I were to have a wand 100% of the time they would, I’m sure they would use that as a microphone. I’m pretty sure.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:12:06

I mean, it’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:12:06

probably

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:12:07

true.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:12:07

Show and tell, I mean, who knows what they’re doing when they go and they have their show and tell, gosh,

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:12:13

what I like about wands is they offer full coverage. So you could put this and literally put it really anywhere along the genitals, and you are going to engorge and stimulate all of this erectile tissue. Has your question, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:12:31

this is not, would that happen without a cognitive component? For in my mind, and I don’t know this to be true, but someone could brush against a man who would get an erection, maybe not almost a reflex would the same. I mean, number one, is that true?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:12:54

So I would say it’s not true. I mean young men like they’re when they’re going through high school and their hormones are going crazy, right? You they walk up to the chalkboard and they get an erection right back when we hit chalkboards. So yes, with like arousal or stimulation or thoughts, people can become aroused without even any stimulation, right? The largest sex organ is actually the brain. Not even the genitals will putting a vibrator on the clitoris get a woman to orgasm if her brain space is not in there

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:13:26

or engorge?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:13:28

Oh, that’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer to that. And it would be interesting once we have the technology to assess blood flow to the clitoris, whether or not you can get engorgement without, let’s say the brain arousal, yeah, because, like, for example, in men, I can inject tri mix, let’s say even when a patient is under anesthesia and asleep. And I can induce blood flow to the organ, right? And I would guess that putting a vibrator to the clitoris would increase blood flow to the genital tissue even outside of that person. Being like mentally aroused,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:14:05

makes sense?

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:14:06

Yeah. And so this allows for full coverage where you don’t have to be as precise when you use a smaller vibrator, let’s say a bullet vibrator. Nothing against them, but you have to be more precise with those to get it on the right spot. Okay. Now, there are other technologies out there. Have you ever heard of like clitoral suction devices? No.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:14:23

So I

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:14:23

haven’t used this one either yet, and I just got it on my

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:14:26

own.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:14:27

But yeah, so it’s, it’s a lemon, and then if you push this button right here, I want you to kind of what feel, what the sensation is, because it’s very different from vibration. Vibration is wonderful. Vibration, though, if you use kind of the same setting can be desensitizing, which a lot of people ask about, is they say, I kind of lose sensation in the moment, and I’ve experienced that before too. It comes back, right? And that’s why I like vibrators that have different settings, where it’s not just a constant vibration, but pressure air waves, with these clitoral. Suction devices. It’s a different sensation that tends to not desensitize the tissue, and so you would just like put this on the clitoris. You can also put it on the nipples for people who enjoy nipple stimulation. Now, some people will say they’re big concerns. If I get used to these products, will I require them every time? Well, you just have to train your body right? If you want to be able to climax with or without toys, then you need to train your body with and without toys. If the only way that you climax is with a toy, then you likely will require a toy to climax, right? It’s like something same thing, like training at the gym. If you train a certain way, don’t be don’t expect yourself to perform in a different way than how you’re training, right? I look at these devices as adjuncts, right? So there’s a degree to which I’m going to get personal here. I can experience an orgasm without toys. Okay, my orgasms are much better when I use a toy. So what do I do? I use a toy, and I don’t want to have to have to choose between, let’s say, Pinot, vaginal intercourse and using a toy. These toys oftentimes you can combine together, right? So it’s about expanding our toolbox, expanding our experiences. Again, I’m going to bring up this concept, not coming from place of deficiency. I would never tell a partner they’re bad in bed, but I would say I want to have the most amazing intimate experience with you, so let’s use everything at our disposal to have the best sex ever, not just mediocre sex, all right, um,

Speaker 6 2:16:33

I like, I like

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:16:35

ending on that. Yeah, perfect. That’s good. Okay,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:16:41

we’re gonna do. So I’m just gonna say thank you so much.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:16:47

Yeah, because

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:16:48

I have, I have to get my before Yes. So I need to make sure that I’m serious. By 530 I have to be on the road. Okay.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:17:00

Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:17:03

Dr Amy Pearlman, this has been one of the most educational, informative and fun episodes that I have done. And I’ve been doing this for about four years. You are probably very popular when you come in with your bags. But in all seriousness, you are a highly trained physician. What I love is having transparent conversations, conversations that healthcare providers are not thinking about should be thinking about to better the experience of our fellow human. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:17:36

It’s been such an honor being with you here today. Gabrielle, awesome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:17:42

Okay, really quick.

Dr. Amy Pearlman 2:17:43

Okay,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 2:17:44

you.