How to Manage Painful Erections
Painful erections are usually more than a mild inconvenience. Learn what to do once it happens, including how the right treatment can help.
Your sex life is critical to your overall wellness, so if you’re encountering issues, it’s important to identify and treat them. While erectile dysfunction is one of the primary sexual dysfunctions, certain ejaculation disorders can also be problematic.
As men’s health experts, Dr. Mike Hsieh and Jose Luis Ruiz, PA, have considerable experience helping men with sexual dysfunction issues and we believe that education is an essential step.
With that in mind, here we review three of the primary ejaculation disorders and when you might benefit from our help.
As the name implies, premature ejaculation is when you achieve orgasm and ejaculation before you or your partner are ready, usually upon or shortly after penetration.
Premature ejaculation is incredibly common — between 30% and 40% of men experience the issue at some point in their lives.
The issue also has a very subjective side, as defining “premature” can be tricky. The bottom line is that if you and/or your partner are frustrated by the problem, it’s worth looking into.
Many factors can contribute to premature ejaculation, and our first order of business is to identify the underlying cause. To give you an idea, common drivers of premature ejaculation include:
As you can see from this list, potential causes of premature ejaculation are both physical and mental, which is why it’s important that we first identify the problem, so we know best how to treat it.
On the other end of the ejaculation disorder spectrum is delayed ejaculation, which describes a condition in which it takes an extended time to achieve sexual satisfaction. In some cases, men are unable to arrive at orgasm and ejaculation at all.
Much like premature ejaculation, it’s difficult to put a timeframe to this issue. Suffice it to say that if your delayed ejaculation is negatively impacting your sex life, you might want to consider investigating how you can remedy the situation.
As with premature ejaculation, there may be either mental or physical causes of this ejaculation disorder that range from depression to nerve injury in your penis. When you come to see us, we first review your symptoms so that we can narrow down the possibilities. We then spend considerable time discussing your physical and mental health so that we can pinpoint and treat the likely culprit behind the delayed ejaculation.
Under normal circumstances, when you ejaculate, a muscle at the neck of your bladder contracts, which keeps urine in your bladder and directs the ejaculate to flow through and out your urethra. When you have retrograde ejaculation, this muscle malfunctions and the ejaculate enters your bladder instead.
Fortunately, retrograde ejaculation isn’t serious and doesn’t affect your sexual function — you’re still able to achieve orgasm, though only a tiny amount of semen will exit your penis. Surprisingly, retrograde ejaculation doesn’t affect your fertility all that much as enough sperm can usually still make its way out.
Whatever your issue, if an ejaculation disorder is standing in the way of a satisfying sex life, please contact our office in La Jolla, California, so that we can help.
