Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Why is Viagra Prescribed

Viagra comes in tablet form in dosages of 25mg, 50mg and 100mg.
Men Up to 65 Years of Age - order cialis 50mg is prescribed to be taken once a day, 30 minutes to 4 hours before intercourse. In situations where 50mg isn't effective, your doctor may prescribe 100mg to be taken once daily 30 minutes to 4 hours before intercourse.
For Men Older than 65 Years of Age - cheap cialis 25mg is prescribed to be taken 30 minutes to 4 hours before intercourse. In some circumstances, men older then 65 may have their doses increased.
Very few drugs work perfectly, and Viagra® is no exception. Just about every drug has side effects that arise because the drug is flowing throughout the body and may affect parts of the body unintentionally. For example, aspirin is a drug that relieves pain, but this same drug can also erode the stomach lining and thin the blood. Those are side effects of aspirin.
The first problem comes because Viagra happens to have a spillover effect. It blocks PDE5, but it also has an effect on PDE6. It turns out that PDE6 is used in the cone cells in the retina, so Viagra can have an effect on color vision. Many people who take Viagra notice a change in the way they perceive green and blue colors, or they see the world with a bluish tinge for several hours. For this reason, pilots cannot take Viagra within 12 hours of a flight.
The second problem comes for people who are taking drugs like nitroglycerin for angina. Nitroglycerin works by increasing nitric oxide, and it helps with angina by opening up the arteries that supply the heart with oxygen. If you take nitroglycerin and Viagra together, the increased nitric oxide plus the blocking of PDE5 can lead to problems.
Other problems with Viagra can include little things like headaches (the drug, as a side effect in some men, opens up arteries in the brain's lining and causes excess pressure) and big things like heart attacks. The possibility of heart attacks is one reason why Viagra is a prescription drug rather than an over-the-counter drug like aspirin. A doctor needs to understand your medical history and make sure that Viagra won't cause a heart attack. Occasional patients who take Viagra get painful, long-lasting erections and have to see a doctor to solve the problem.
Finally, there is some concern that some men, especially younger men who take Viagra recreationally and who don't really need it for physical reasons, may end up with a dependency on the drug. That is, they may become unable to maintain an erection without taking Viagra.

Electronic Medical Records = Why Doctors Resist EMR Checklists: What Googlers May Not Understand

It sounds so logical. The purchase cialis lists patient symptoms, types the symptoms into Google, and out pops an exhaustive list of diagnostic possibilities based on the medical literature. What could be simpler? What could be more ideal in sorting through medical information?

According to a journal Science blog, in a meeting of a group of Obama advisors that advises Obama on EMRs and other matters, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt openly wondered why doctors haven’t embraced databases to help them sort through medical information. In a comment directed to Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon and New Yorker writer, Schmidt said,

“So when you show up at the cheap cialis with some set of symptoms, in my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository. Then this knowledge engine would use best practices, and all the knowledge in the world to give physicians some sort of standardized guidance. This is a generalized form of the checklists that you’re talking about…”

Gawande explained,

“I think part of the bafflement occurs because the folks who know how to make such systems don’t understand how the clinical encounter actually operates. A database is likely to return more information than a clinician could make sense of during a patient visit when there are '15 minutes to manage six problems.'

Still, he added, " the right kind of apps for 'for your iPhone or whatever the new Google one is' could be useful for doctors.”

Gawande might have added:

1) Doctors don’t like to type. That’s clerk work.

2) Doctors don’t like to place computers between themselves and patients. That depersonalizes the encounter.

3) Most diagnoses are self-evident. They don’t require a list to sort through.

4) Computer lists often contain more information that you want to know. Besides, not pursuing a lead might be used against you in a malpractice suit.

5) Inserting a computer into the work flow is expensive and disruptive and slows things up when you’re trying to see 30 patients that day.

6) Computers have their place, but when it comes to diagnoses in the course of a busy day, they offer few miracles, except perhaps, in a few isolated, difficult cases.