Dr James Le Fanu: 24 May
There is every reason why men of a certain age might wish to buy cut-price Viagra on the internet – but they cannot be sure of getting the real thing. A couple of years ago during a raid on a factory in Thailand, police seized 80,000 counterfeit pills made from brick dust and blue paint and prepared in a cement mixer.
Paradoxically, those taking these cheap counterfeit pills might still find them effective – as suggested by an account in the British Medical Journal by family doctor Gabriel Jaffe of his success in treating male sexual dysfunction (as it is inelegantly called) in the pre-Viagra days. When working as a ship’s doctor on a large transatlantic liner, he was consulted by an elegant 67-year-old man on honeymoon with his 28-year-old wife. The survival of the marriage was apparently already in the balance and he enquired whether Dr Jaffe might have some powerful hormone pills to help put things right.
There was nothing in the ship’s small pharmacy that could conceivably be of value and Dr Jaffe was at the point of giving up when he noticed a small dust-covered bottle at the back of a drawer containing a few bright purple tablets labelled Tab-Aspirin. ‘I put all seven tablets in an envelope with directions to take one at bedtime and a warning on no account to exceed the prescribed dose,’ he writes.
For the rest of the journey Dr Jaffe’s patient was nowhere to be seen, but shortly before they reached their destination he reappeared in the surgery for reasons that soon became obvious.
‘Fantastic tablets, worked like a miracle,’ he remarked. ‘Could you give me some more for when I get home?’ It was with ‘considerable diffidence’ that Dr Jaffe gave him a prescription for ‘Tabs acetylsalicylic acid (purple)’ hoping no one would reveal their better-known name before they disembarked.
There are several ramifications of this interesting tale. The first being that aspirin may indeed be the potent remedy Dr Jaffe’s patient found it to be, but nobody is telling us. More probably the ‘fantastic’ results were due to the placebo effect, restoring the confidence that is such an essential element of the male sexual response. But this raises the question of how many of those paying good money for a private prescription of Viagra might be just as well served by the much cheaper counterfeit version – as long as they thought it was the real thing.
THIS WEEK’S MEDICAL QUERY comes courtesy of a lady from Suffolk writing on behalf of her two daughters, aged three and six, both of whom have been afflicted for the past year by the skin condition molluscum contagiosum – a couple of dozen wart-like pustules spread out in a line on the inner arm. Her family doctor reassures her they will ‘get better’ but there is no sign of this. What should she do?
This is one of those tricky situations where parents might quite rightly feel the doctor should be ‘doing something’, such as freezing off these little protuberant warty lesions, but this can be traumatic and cause persistent scarring. There are, however, several anecdotal reports on the internet of the value of a regular application of tea tree oil or an ‘antiviral’ and costly cream (only available from the United States) called Conzerol.
drjames@lady.co.uk
Paradoxically, those taking these cheap counterfeit pills might still find them effective – as suggested by an account in the British Medical Journal by family doctor Gabriel Jaffe of his success in treating male sexual dysfunction (as it is inelegantly called) in the pre-Viagra days. When working as a ship’s doctor on a large transatlantic liner, he was consulted by an elegant 67-year-old man on honeymoon with his 28-year-old wife. The survival of the marriage was apparently already in the balance and he enquired whether Dr Jaffe might have some powerful hormone pills to help put things right.
There was nothing in the ship’s small pharmacy that could conceivably be of value and Dr Jaffe was at the point of giving up when he noticed a small dust-covered bottle at the back of a drawer containing a few bright purple tablets labelled Tab-Aspirin. ‘I put all seven tablets in an envelope with directions to take one at bedtime and a warning on no account to exceed the prescribed dose,’ he writes.
For the rest of the journey Dr Jaffe’s patient was nowhere to be seen, but shortly before they reached their destination he reappeared in the surgery for reasons that soon became obvious.
‘Fantastic tablets, worked like a miracle,’ he remarked. ‘Could you give me some more for when I get home?’ It was with ‘considerable diffidence’ that Dr Jaffe gave him a prescription for ‘Tabs acetylsalicylic acid (purple)’ hoping no one would reveal their better-known name before they disembarked.
There are several ramifications of this interesting tale. The first being that aspirin may indeed be the potent remedy Dr Jaffe’s patient found it to be, but nobody is telling us. More probably the ‘fantastic’ results were due to the placebo effect, restoring the confidence that is such an essential element of the male sexual response. But this raises the question of how many of those paying good money for a private prescription of Viagra might be just as well served by the much cheaper counterfeit version – as long as they thought it was the real thing.
THIS WEEK’S MEDICAL QUERY comes courtesy of a lady from Suffolk writing on behalf of her two daughters, aged three and six, both of whom have been afflicted for the past year by the skin condition molluscum contagiosum – a couple of dozen wart-like pustules spread out in a line on the inner arm. Her family doctor reassures her they will ‘get better’ but there is no sign of this. What should she do?
This is one of those tricky situations where parents might quite rightly feel the doctor should be ‘doing something’, such as freezing off these little protuberant warty lesions, but this can be traumatic and cause persistent scarring. There are, however, several anecdotal reports on the internet of the value of a regular application of tea tree oil or an ‘antiviral’ and costly cream (only available from the United States) called Conzerol.
drjames@lady.co.uk