Erectile dysfunction (ED) means one's difficulty or the inability to raise an erection. Reasons for ED are varied but as with all cures you need to know what the exact problem is first. Lets look at impotence and erectile dysfunction in more detail.

The reasons are various and many in most cases, starting from anxiety and compounding that with illness and other factors.

The truth is that if you are a young man with ED, you may have a mental origin of your ED.

If you are older, you may have a health reason for it. You have to try and understand what is causing your ED.

Physiological ED

If you have noticed that you have a problem, the first place to notice is if it's physiological.

Are you healthy?

Do you have high blood pressure?

Have you been tested for diabetes or hypoglycemia?

Go and get a check up. If the doctor finds you are healthy, then the root of your ED is based in the psychological rather than physiological area.

However, if you are in any way ill, or have some health factor that is causing your body any stress or strain, your ED may also be rooted there as well.

It is also a fact that if you do have a nightly erection (nocturnal, and while you sleep) the cause of your ED will most likely be psychological.

If your ED is physiological (and there are many tests to prove it), then solving your physiological problem will usually solve your ED problem.

Psychological ED

If the ED is shown to have a psychological origin, perhaps coming from stress or performance anxiety, or some other reason of a non-medical nature, the ED can be helped or cured by any number of ways.

A trained therapist can guide the ED sufferer through some relaxing techniques, or other method, to assure that there is a good connection between the mind and body, assuring the ED will disappear.

As ED is also not well understood from the psychological point of view, the person with ED needs to find some device that reassures the mind that ED will not interfere with his sexual activities.

Once assured, and forming a strong belief in the sufferer's mind, the ED can and usually will cease to be a problem.

Aids to the Sufferer with either Physiological or Psychologically Caused ED.

The most recent and best known treatments are the PDE5 Inhibitors. These are of course Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra.

Their effectiveness are well known and are drugs that are taken orally before eventual sexual activity.

Another drug that is used is Apomorphin.

It is taken orally, but placed under the tongue. It acts only under sexual stimulation, and is good only for mild cases of ED.

There are mechanical solutions, such as implants to the penis (both inflatable and permanent), which keep the penis rigid.

Another method is the vacuum pump which draws blood into a flaccid penis, and with the use of an elastic band, keeps the penis rigid for about 30 to 40 minutes.

There are many herbal mixtures, many of which opinion is divided.

Of the least is Ginseng, and many clinical tests have shown that the use of ginseng is far superior to that of a placebo

Their use is under constant review, but as in all things psychological, where the sufferer believes he will be helped, he usually will be and many natural cures simply dot work.

However the good is there some that do and in many cases taking the ones medically proven can help cure impotence and erectile dysfunction and that is the subject of further articles in this series