Erectile Dysfunction: How Stress, Toxins, & Nerves Affect Performance
with Dr. Jordan Barber
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical toxicity, the health issues caused by toxins, and more advanced topics in health than you’ll hear on other podcasts. I love to talk about bioenergetics and emotional trauma and advanced biohacking and just all kinds of things that interest me that I want to share with you.
Today, we’re going to talk about erectile dysfunction. It’s something that affects millions of people, men as well as their girlfriends and wives. It’s not just the men. But we’re going to talk about all the underlying causes with my guest, Dr. Jordan Barber, and we’ll really go in depth. I realized I hadn’t done a show yet on this topic, and there are a lot of underlying root causes.
When you go to your doctor, you’re going to be told that it’s a blood flow issue, maybe a cardiac health issue. But it’s much more complex than that. There are hormones, medications, hair regrowth medications that people are using, and emotional trauma. Stress also plays a huge role. It could be issues with pelvic floor issues, and the muscles being really tight and the hips being really tight. Nerve issues and problems with the lower back squeezing on the nerves, such as the vertebrae putting pressure on the nerves that innervate that area. More so, it could be caused by problems with the vagus nerve, porn, emotional trauma, and performance anxiety.
We’re going to touch on all of these things. You can work with Jordan as well if you need help in that area. It’s a really educational podcast. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jordan Barber
Thank you, Wendy, for having me. I can’t wait to talk about this topic.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into health?
Jordan Barber
When I’m asked this question, I talk about the movie, Office Space. I feel like my life is like that. I started in IT when I was 21, and I had a lot of health issues and went through 9/11. I’m a New Yorker, if you can’t tell by my accent. That kind of shifted me into a different direction of trying to fix myself, because nothing else was working. I wound up within one month of acupuncture, which was like a last-ditch effort. I didn’t think it was a real thing. I was scared of needles, like most people. Within one month, I was 80% better, and I was like, “All right. We’re going to figure this out.” It dovetailed with a lot of the other stuff I was going through, including the spiritual systems behind it. I just thought it was a beautiful art, and here we are 20-something years later.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You came on the show to talk about erectile dysfunction, which affects a lot of people for various reasons. I want to unpack this a little bit. Tell us why most people think erectile dysfunction is just about performance, and what it really is a bigger sign of? What are some of the underlying root causes?
Jordan Barber
I think people see the issue and narrow it around there. It’s as if the penis isn’t working; that must be the problem. But that’s really the indicator of their overall health. For a male, you’re looking at so many things that are behind the ability to have and maintain an erection. This includes stress responses, hormone cascades, biomechanical pressure, nerve interference, and all these different things. By the time the penis doesn’t work, it’s a little too late. There were all those other signs you probably ignored.
I think the important thing when we’re talking about this subject is to really understand why it’s occurring and figure out the root cause, because everyone just thinks it’s a blood flow issue. You take a PDE5 like Viagra or Cialis, which have their own effects on nitric oxide and can be good for the body. But that’s not often the entire picture, and it doesn’t always work. Then there are side effects that come with it. When you understand the overall picture of health and see that the ability for the penis to work in a male is a sign of health, a happy relationship, and of a man having a sense of themselves and feeling masculine. There’s just so much that occurs with having an erection.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s also an underlying sign of cardiovascular health. Can you talk about that?
Jordan Barber
That’s where I’ll put the pushback, because that’s what street medicine says. And yeah, 100%, if you have lipid profile issues, the small capillaries can’t fill, and the blood can’t get there. But that is such a reductionist view of erectile dysfunction. If you’re 65 and over, maybe. That makes much more sense because you’ve had a long time, a bad lipid profile, and large particle size lipids that are probably blocking it. But what about when you’re 22? Do you have blood flow issues? That’s all they tell you.
You go to the doctor, and they will say, “it’s a blood flow issue. Here’s a PDE5, which is going to increase nitric oxide, and therefore it’s going to vasodilate, and more blood will flow into the penis”. Isn’t that great? But what if it’s not that? More blood will flow into the penis. It will work to a certain point, but what about the ability to have sensation down there? What about when there are pelvic floor issues in men that are not even talked about? We think pelvic floor issues are only in females. Men probably can’t even identify what the pelvic floor is. Yet depending on the studies, 10 to 20% of men will experience pelvic floor dysfunction in their lives, whereas 60-something percent of women will, obviously, because they give birth. So there’s a lot more that can happen there. But it still affects men.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about that. What’s going on with pelvic floor dysfunction, and what can be done about that?
Jordan Barber
I’ll backtrack a little to explain where I’m coming from. My background is in Chinese medicine, which is strange. Why is someone talking about erectile dysfunction when they do acupuncture and Chinese medicine? Well, there’s plenty written about the production of hormones and the ability to maintain an erection through thousands of years of Chinese literature, as well as sexual and cultivation practices. They were studying this stuff. My doctoral focus is in pain, with my published research being dry needling, which is a subset of acupuncture using a needle to soften musculature. My subclinical specialty is in pelvic floor dysfunction. That’s the bias I’m coming from, and the information I’m going to give you is going to come from that. Someone with a different background is going to say something different.
To explain pelvic floor dysfunction, let’s define the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is muscles within the pelvis itself down to the perineum. You have the levator ani complex, a complex of several muscles down there that surround the anus, the perineum. For men you have muscles down there that are responsible for filling and maintaining an erection, ejaculation, and urination, and other things.
Any guy that’s ever done a deadlift or played a sport will tell you that they’ve felt that muscle once before at least, and then they ignore it. Or they feel a little spasm or a numbness or maybe a slight post-ejaculation pain. They don’t think it’s anything. They may think, “Oh, I probably pulled something in the gym”. Because they felt it also when they were deadlifting. This is the correlation, because those muscles that are responsible for sending blood into the penis are innervated by the pudendal nerve, which runs through the hip. It comes through the hip itself and is predominantly compressed by a muscle called the obturator internus, which is a hip muscle.
When you have tight hips, you get pressure on the pudendal nerve, poor signaling, and poor firing of these muscles called bulbospongiosus and predominantly ischiocavernosus. These are two small muscles at the perineum in the base of the penis. Women have these muscles too even though they do slightly different things. But, they’re responsible for sexual function and urination. This is the picture that people don’t pay attention to, especially in straight medicine.
Then, stress affects nerve signaling. It’s well known that stress affects men’s ability to have an erection. Why? I’ll spare you, but we can go into the signaling process that has to occur in the relationship between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems to maintain and have an erection, and to not have an erection.
Also, we may consider the role of hormones in erectile dysfunction. We can get into those as you want. But there’s so much that goes on. You see the biomechanical relationship and how the pelvic floor can play into that. Even just think of adductors, where do they connect? Hamstrings, and quads. Where’s all that connecting and pulling? Where’s that pressure coming from? Yet, you’re doing a 300-pound squat or you’re playing soccer or you’re just sitting in your chair all day and those muscles are getting tight.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What can be done about that? What do you recommend for men? You probably have to maintain flexibility and strength.
Jordan Barber
In general, if a man’s not strength training, eventually he is going to have problems throughout the entire body. It’s tricky because not everyone deals with the same issue. In a modern world, I can’t say just do these things and you’ll always be healthy. The modern world requires sitting in chairs and cars. We’re just not doing things that are functional movements anymore. So, go do some functional movements, even for 30 minutes a day. It’s better than nothing. I think the number one thing is to become more aware of your pelvic floor itself. What is it? Go on ChatGPT and ask it a few questions. We have AI now, for good and for worse that can help you answer some questions. If you feel anything down there, start having a conversation because men don’t talk about these things.
One of the major signs of pelvic floor dysfunction in men is post-void dribbling, which basically means just a very little bit of urine trickles out after you’re done urinating. Probably not a big deal. Everyone may feel, “Oh, whatever. Eh, I guess it happens.” But if it’s happening over and over, that same muscle is responsible for ejaculation and maintaining an erection. It’s giving you a signal. And maybe it’s not even that muscle, it could be downstream, as we were just talking. Different muscles pushing on different nerves, compression, or improper sympathetic tone, or hormones.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned nerves before. Could we talk a little about that? Because there are a lot of different things that can affect the nerve structurally. Viruses like herpes can affect nerves. Sciatica can be caused by a herpes virus. There are eight different herpes viruses, and that can affect the nerves going to that pelvic region. Can you talk about the chiropractic vertebra issues compressing nerves and that affecting the penis?
Jordan Barber
Anytime you have spinal segment dysfunction from whatever etiology, whether it’s viral injury, muscular tension, herniations, you’re going to have an effect on the reflexes that occur there. As I was saying before, you have a musculoskeletal visceral reflex. Different reflexes are how those different areas of the segments innervate certain things, because those segments innervate muscles, viscera, and sensory areas. There are all these different parts that go through each spinal segment, and you have these interrelationships between them.
When there are problems or damage or anything going on there, you’ll have kind of crosstalk between these different segments. If there’s stress within the muscular system, there’s going to be a lot of information coming through there from whatever cause. That’s going to create a musculoskeletal visceral reflex, which may either upregulate or downregulate certain things, giving you an urge to urinate, or decreasing the ability for the testes to have certain signaling. Muscles may be unable to do the things they’re supposed to do to fill the penis for erectile function.
In modern chiropractic, because they used to have the idea of subluxation theory, some of them still subscribe to it, and that’s fine. But essentially, when there’s something wrong at that segment, if you make that segment happier and better by getting it to move better, you get the facet joint to start moving. So there’s no pressure in the intervertebral space where the nerve comes out and you will have proper signaling. I believe that’s fully true. So I think manipulation has its place within it. But if it’s viral, I don’t know how much manipulation could help that, in which case you’re going to have to do other things and I think that’s actually much more in your world than mine. We do a lot of Chinese herbs, but that’s when you have to look at detoxing and all the other stuff related to it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
For chiropractic, I really like the Torque Release Technique, or TRT, and that’s what I personally use. My cousin’s a chiropractor, and there’s no physical manipulation. It’s more of an energetic tool, and it’s worked the best of anything I’ve ever used to fix lower back issues or all the spinal issues. Let’s talk about one of the more common causes of erectile dysfunction, just so we check that box; performance anxiety. Can you just touch on that?
Jordan Barber
Performance anxiety is a stress response. It’s a sympathetic state. So ultimately, if a man has performance anxiety, they’re going to be stuck in a sympathetic state, which as we know, we need parasympathetic tone to have an erection. It will not allow you to maintain or have a firm erection. Your body’s still going to do what it can for that sacral plexus area to send a parasympathetic tone to make this cascade occur. But if your overall body is stuck in that fight or flight where you feel, “Oh my God, can I do this?” or whatever is going through the mind, then we’re stuck.
The tools I use for that with men who are having those difficulties is vagus nerve stimulation and other ways to bring the body’s overall sympathetic tone down and bring it more into that rest-and-digest state. If they’re constantly stuck in a little more worry state, you can see their hormones are going to start going off as well, because you have elevated cortisol and everything else. But if it’s just incidental, it’s usually just a sympathetic tone, in which case you can start talking about how to do deep breathing exercises and control your tone right then and there and see if they can calm their state while they’re with a partner. Provided they feel comfortable enough, they could probably get themselves to a calmer state where they’ll be able to have that erection.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about the vagus nerve, because that’s a nerve that innervates our body and our entire pelvic region and the digestion and so many other things. What is the vagus nerve and how does that affect erectile dysfunction?
Jordan Barber
The vagus nerve overall controls the body’s tone, that’s the simple way of saying it. When we’re talking about the body between just sympathetic and parasympathetic states, fight or flight versus rest or digest, we see it as a meter, like a gas meter. We want the body to have full ability to go from full to empty and back and forth. But a lot of people are stuck in just half that meter, so even when they feel like they’re calm, they’re really just at the center of that gas meter. This is what we call sympathetic lock, just being stuck in a sympathetic state. So even your calm state is barely parasympathetic. Those people with sleeplessness and similar issues have a high cortisol state. That over time is just heightened stress.
There are many different branches and ways to do vagus nerve stimulation, which a lot of people are doing. My preference is more of the auricular branch, but that’s my bias as well with ear acupuncture and things like that. There is numerous and reliable clinical research out there indicating that the ear is innervated by the auricular vagus nerve. There are certain areas that are almost 100% innervated by it, so it’s a very great access point, and it’s a lot safer than when you’re running electrical current across the carotid, which could also have some side effects.
When you start doing vagus nerve stimulation, you bring the body into a parasympathetic state, and it’s a good way to get that full breath of the meter we’re talking about so that you’re no longer in these sympathetic lock states. Especially for me in New York City with my finance guys and high-powered executives, their calm state is nowhere near calm. And then they’re like, “Why do I have erectile dysfunction? I have no clue why.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
A lot of people have a problem with vagus nerve tone for many reasons, including emotional trauma and just growing up in a stressful environment. Can you talk about emotional trauma and how that can affect erectile dysfunction?
Jordan Barber
Trauma is a big word, and it can be from many sources. One of the things, the elephant in the room when we’re talking about sexual function, is there can be sexual trauma, and there can be a lot of somatic stuff. The phrase used is “the issues in the tissues” but we call it muscle memory, or guarding reflexes. Even though a person might say, “I’m an adult, I’ve been through therapy, and I’m perfectly fine with it,” the system still kind of holds onto it. So that’s one area of trauma.
Ultimately, any sort of trauma like PTSD or anything similar, as I expressed, going through 9/11, I didn’t even know what PTSD was back then, but was described as, “oh, you’re having these wild dreams, you’re scared to go on airplanes, big loud noises scare you”. That’s showing that the body’s stuck in this sympathetic state.
Trauma can create all these Pavlovian responses that are in the system, and you have to get them out. One way is training the body through biofeedback, whether it’s vagus nerve or breath work. There are so many great things out there to take away the systemic response to the trauma. EMDR is really good for that. A lot of those therapy techniques have come a long way. And even ketamine as a strong dissociative has been shown to be fairly good with certain things.
Dr. Wendy Myers
We get out of my depth on that one. I’m a big fan of E4L software. It’s a type of software that can detect bio energetically through a galvanic skin response to all of the different types of emotional trauma you have, and sends a frequency to your body to release it. It’s very easy because a lot of trauma we’re not consciously aware of enough to even discuss it in therapy, and there are frequencies in our body that can be measured and released with frequencies. Personally, that’s what I’ve used and it’s super effective. It’s called E4L.
You’ve mentioned stress a few different times. Can we go back to that? Because so many people are under so many different types of stress, such as nutritional stress, EMF from Wi-Fi, emotional traumas, work stress. So many different types. Can you touch on that and any tips you give people to reduce it?
Jordan Barber
I think it’s important to clarify that any stress is a stress. Whether it’s EMF, Wi-Fi, or work stress. Everyone’s body is uniquely resilient. Some people can sit in an EMF cage all day and you barely see anything happen to them. Other people are super sensitive in that they can tell if Wi-Fi is nearby. Everybody is different. So there’s no cookie-cutter approach, and you need a really good clinician to figure these things out.
Stress itself affects the nervous system. The erection is the nervous system. But what is the nervous system? It’s an interplay between so many other things. Long-term steady stress elevates cortisol, affects the HPA axis, and the HP gonadal axis. So you’re going to have a decrease in hormones. If you have a decrease in hormones or an imbalance in estrogen, estradiol, and testosterone in men, you’re going to have problems with penile sensitivity and maintaining an erection because the signaling is going to be off.
If you are exposed to toxins or things that are estrogenic, it’s going to change your hormone cascade, and if you start becoming too estrogenic as a man, you’re going to be less resilient to stress and have less energy because it’s not the right hormonal profile for you. In which case it becomes stress on the system, and again, the penis becomes one of the things where you see a problem. But it can be digestive issues, among other things. Eventually it’ll make its way to the penis.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s expand a little bit more on hormones. When you make stress hormones, that is when you’re stressed out, that’s happening at the expense of sex hormones like testosterone that you need to get an erection and have a healthy libido. Can you talk a little more about that?
Jordan Barber
I think one of the bigger issues is that a lot of people lack the precursors to create the hormones that they need. So there’s creating the wrong amount of hormones under duress, but also not having the right amount, whether it’s nutritionally zinc or magnesium, having the right fatty acids, or getting enough sunlight for proper signaling for biorhythm to create the hormones that they need. So there are a lot of things that go into the hormone cascade.
The way I work with my patients on it is that I examine how they kind of exist within their life. If they’re getting up before the sun or getting up at 10:00 in the morning, I already identify that there’s a hormonal cascade issue because there’s a circadian rhythm issue, in which case we have to interact at that place and get them back onto a more circadian rhythm. Unless they have a sleep shift issue or something else because they are night workers, that’s almost a nightmare to deal with.
I do a lot of biomodulation as far as light, making sure that people reduce the bright light in the evening, and try to put away their cell phones (which is practically impossible these days). All these things via the opsin receptors of the eye affect melatonin production, which in turn affects sleep states and affects IGF-1 secretion (which is kind of like the master hormone), throwing off everything. You have the HPA axis go off and then we’re back to exactly where we were talking. It’s an infinite loop of disaster.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’m sure there are some men, especially if they’re over 50 that may need testosterone replacement. It may just be a low testosterone issue because they’re going into andropause. I know from supplementing testosterone myself, being in menopause, that the more testosterone you have, the more libido and sexual desire you have. For men, testosterone will help them to get an erection. And so that conceivably can be the issue for some men.
Jordan Barber
Definitely. There’s a few things here. I’ve seen on labs guys in their 20s with the tanked testosterone of an 80-year-old. Now, that may be more diet and lifestyle. I’m not saying they necessarily need TRT at that point. But it’s becoming a larger issue maybe because EMF is at play or poor food quality due to all the chemicals that are in food. I kind of believe that, I just don’t have the evidence behind it, but I’m pretty sure of it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Toxins are playing a huge role in that as well. Heavy metals and chemicals wreak absolute havoc on our hormones and destroy our ability to produce hormones and convert them. All the pesticides have the same effect. The thyroid too is such a major signaler to all of this.
Jordan Barber
You have bromide and the different halides that bind to the same receptors. And then elevated stress creates a reverse T3, which is a stereoisomer of T3. It binds to the receptor but instead can’t be used by the thyroid essentially. Your basic thyroid panel looks fine until someone looks for reverse T3, but no one looks for reverse T3. So they’re like, “Oh, you’re fine,” but you’re lethargic and everything else, and the rest of your hormones are going to go out of whack. We have had bromide since the 90s being stuffed in our bread. I don’t even know why. It’s a halide, it’s a dough softener, and it binds to our receptors. And it’s in Jacuzzis and pools too.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It makes them fluffier, like yoga mats. I don’t think the bread needed to be softer, but there are so many disruptors in our environment. We take all of them for granted as part of our normal life. What’s in my soap? The average stuff that guys are using is loaded with chemicals. Maybe some of that is transdermally absorbed, or then it gets flushed down into a water supply, and then you drink it later on once it comes back because those chemicals don’t disappear. So I think that’s one of the things that guys have to think about when they’re seeing their testosterone decrease.
Jordan Barber
For men and women, especially men, there’s a ratio of estrogen and testosterone that must be maintained. If you become too estrogenic, the testosterone is not going to do the same things it would. But then you can add more testosterone, that’s great. However, is it just turning the volume knob louder? Are we just stimulating those receptors so that we get more function? If the labs are down, especially in older men in andropause, it makes more sense. But in younger guys, there’s a quality of life issue. Maybe you go on TRT in your 30s.
I actually love bioidentical hormones when they’re used appropriately. But there are people who are just like, “The hormones fix everything.” No, they stimulate more. Therefore, we’re just flooding those receptors so they work with endogenous hormones. We fixed the problem. But we didn’t actually fix the reason why you’re not producing the stuff. If that makes you feel fine and suddenly everything’s fine, no big deal as long as you are healthy and you stay on top of it.
However, if your system is bombarded with stress, your lifestyle is generally poor, and you’re eating poorly, you’re going to have other problems down the line. I think a much more holistic model of figuring out why your hormones aren’t working, doing everything you can, and maybe supplementing a little with hormones as necessary, makes a lot of sense. A lot of guys just want to get on juice. They think it’s going to make them Superman in bed and give them giant muscles. It doesn’t at all because they didn’t fix any of the other issues.
Dr. Wendy Myers
There’s so much stacked against male hormones. There are so many estrogenic substances and estrogen mimickers in our environment. This includes the plastics, the pesticides, all of the petroleum-based beauty products and perfumes, and guys spraying themselves with cologne. These things are estrogenic, and they’re in our water, our food, and in the air that we breathe. There’s a lot working against our hormones. That’s why I promote detoxification so much. But let’s talk about diet because that’s very foundational and a lot of people are getting horrifying diets. I also want to talk about vegan and vegetarian diets, if that can be problematic because of a vegan lack of cholesterol in the diet, which is needed to make hormones. What are your thoughts?
Jordan Barber
You’re going to get me naughty emails, so I have to be cautious about what I say. I touched on it before. The precursors to hormones, zinc, fatty acids and magnesium are key. How you get them, as long as they’re bioavailable, I’m not going to fight you on it. I have met healthy vegetarians healthier than me, and I’m not saying I’m picture perfect by any means. People say that you can’t be healthy as a vegan or a vegetarian. I’ve met healthy ones, but I’ve also met extremely sick ones. When we choose a diet, we should choose the diet that works for you, not a diet based on dogma or some idea of saving the world. That’s my view. I’ll probably get all the negative emails.
I am a little more pro-meat and pro-good fats these days. I’ve seen them generally have higher health outcomes when done appropriately. I’m also a big believer in the Randle cycle, so if you’re doing higher fat, you really don’t want to be doing higher carbs at the exact same time. No competing fuel sources because I think that’s where we get a lot of problems such as inflammation. Otherwise, as far as diet, I try not to get too crazy with my patients. I want them to enjoy their life.
I’ve seen a lot of people go to functional medicine practitioners, and next thing you know you have to eat exactly how that practitioner lives. But ultimately, I like to just make sure that the alimentary canal is working. Food goes in, doesn’t bloat, moves along at a correct pace, and comes out in the right way. If that’s happening, I’m happy. If not, we need to reestablish that. That’s kind of my litmus test, very Chinese medicine. If you can digest it and you don’t have any side effects, you’re not bloated, have energy and seem healthy, great.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about medications, specifically hair regrowth medications. I’ve definitely had many patients come to me that have taken Rogaine or minoxidil for a period of time and then have long-standing erectile dysfunction following that. Can you talk about that a bit?
Jordan Barber
You’re talking about the effects on DHT. Theoretically, minoxidil, which is Rogaine, shouldn’t be significantly absorbed transdermally. But it works really well when you derma roll, which means it’s going to be more transdermally absorbed anyway. If you’re using it every single day, there’s a small amount you’re going to absorb. Depending on how your hormones are and how everything else is, that inhibitor of DHT may be too much for your system. For other people, no big deal.
I would say finasteride, the oral one, the kind that everyone takes for their hair, I’ve seen a lot of side effects with that medication. There’s even a syndrome with it, so I’m not a big fan when people take it. But if you’re taking it and you’re fine, I’m not going to be like, “Get off it.” There are a lot of great peptides these days for hair regrowth that seem much safer. You can even do lower dose minoxidil topically and try to find that safe sweet spot. You could embrace baldness or go to Turkey and get a hair transplant.
What’s interesting is that you take GHK-Cu, which is a copper peptide applied topically with some red light therapy and a little derma rolling, and that will help regrow hair. It’s been shown, and it’s copper for the most part, that it’s super safe. There’s a lot out there now, but you’re not going to get that at CVS or from your GP. I’m not super anti-minoxidil, but if someone’s having hormone issues, then we want to look at DHT levels and everything else.
I work with their practitioners and try to identify these things because they’re probably working with a GP who’s saying “Everything’s fine.” I’ll show them, “Your total T is the bell curve of an 80-year-old. Your estradiol, your E2, is too high for your testosterone levels. And you have man boobs, which shows that your estrogen is affecting you. The fatter you are, the more you’re going to be estrogenic, and you’re going to convert testosterone into estrogen. We need dietary changes, we need to work out, and to take this seriously.” And for guys it’s easy to say, “Or you’re just not going to have a happy penis.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think part of this conversation we need to have is about porn. If you’re habitually watching porn, you might have performance issues in real life. Can you talk about that?
Jordan Barber
There are two things. When we’re talking about a hormone cascade, we’re talking about dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine. Constant stimulus of any sort is going to elevate the stimulus needed, and therefore you’re going to need more dopamine to have the same normal response. You didn’t grow up seeing the level of pornography, if any, in the natural world. Only in the recent 15 or 20 years can you see anything that one could imagine on the internet and basically shop to find the thing that stimulates your dopamine receptors enough to make you excited.
It means that one, you’re over-stimming the brain. Two, when you’re with a real person, you’re not going to get that fictitious encounter, and it’s not going to look like that and play out in the way your mind has been habituated to think that a hot sexual experience is supposed to occur. You’re not getting the real-life stimulation that you need, which is going to go through that corticolimbic process that creates the rest of the signaling for the rest of the body to do the things it does. You’re flatlined and like, “Eh, I’m not turned on.” Whereas, I’m 46, I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, and if you saw just a small nipple on a scrambled television, that was enough to send you through the roof as a boy. Now that doesn’t do it for anyone. So it’s a big problem.
I try to take a very neutral kind of path. As long as you’re cognizant and aware, a little goes a long way. I’m not going to say you need to be a monk. But if you’re having serious problems, you need to look at your diet. Part of the diet is the things that you consume, and your eyes are consuming. If your day starts off with going on Pornhub and selecting the thing that makes the most stimulus in your brain that morning, not just your sexual performance but your focus, your alertness, your lust and drive to do things, then your drive to conquer has been satiated because you just over-stimmed your brain. Your brain just feels like it just won. But it didn’t.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everything in moderation. Are there any other root causes that we haven’t touched on?
Jordan Barber
We talked about stress and biomechanics. I can’t understate biomechanics, that’s the one people forget. The adductors are huge, and I promise you, most guys have tight adductors. Most guys don’t stretch, they’re just lifting weights. I work out, I’m going to go work out right after this. I’m probably going to do two minutes of stretching after it. But every morning I do deep squats now, and I make sure that I have it kind of built in my routine. A lot of guys are doing too much and they’re like, “I don’t have time for stretching.” But stretching can happen throughout the day.
We talked about stress, hormone cascade, various things that can come from diet, relationships, and porn. We have also talked about neurological stuff, spinal segmental issues, nerve compression along the pathway, the obturator internus in the hip and everything else. That covers a majority of it, and as we started at the beginning, the tried and true (which is what you’ll get from your GP), is just blood flow issues, hyperlipidemia, et cetera. But when you’re 20 and 30, that’s probably not it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
No. Maybe for some older folks, taking some nitric oxide might be really helpful. I am a big fan of Dr. Bryan’s NO24You which is a nitric oxide lozenge, AM/PM, which also matches when you’re supposed to secrete nitric oxide in the morning when you’re exposed to early bright light and red light. It becomes a little more bioidentical, if we’re talking about bioidentical nitric oxide supplementation, as opposed to taking low-dose Cialis, which will increase nitric oxide but it’s all the time, which means you’re not having the normal biorhythms when nitric oxide is supposed to be down in the dark. I’m more a fan of things that can increase that naturally such as arginine. Eating meat gives you arginine, so that could help as well.
Jordan Barber
That’s right.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think we covered a lot of things. Maybe should we cover some negative side effects of taking Viagra and Cialis? Because that’s the go-to when people go to their doctor. That’s the first thing recommended. What are the problems with that and the side effects?
Jordan Barber
The most common is headache, and that’s just because it affects blood flow. It’s usually transitory, everyone’s fine. The major one is the Viagra blue shift, which will scare the crap out of you. It is if you took blue cellophane and put it in front of you at peak serum. It affects the receptors in the eyes on a certain percentage of people that have a certain specific gene, but it’s not a small percentage. It looks like you’re looking through blue cellophane. Is that long-term? Is that something that could affect the eyes long-term? I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t want that, if something alters my vision as if I’m looking through blue cellophane, I’m never taking that again.
For men who are using poppers, more in the gay community, and the amyl nitrates, you can’t mix those with PDE5s. You will die. There are some serious side effects there. Any time you’re playing with vasodilation, you’re affecting blood pressure and systemic flows in the body, and there could be some deadly consequences.
With Cialis, the number one thing is dizziness as a side effect. It could give you spins where you can’t get out of bed. If you take it long enough, eventually you might get used to it, but I don’t really think that’s advisable. There is some stuff in the literature of vision problems long-term, but I really think they’re more freak occurrences than anything. I think they do a lot of good, and in the anti-aging world, low-dose Cialis has been shown to have a lot of other effects because it does lower blood pressure, and nitric oxide is fairly healthy. I just think it should be done like nature intends it, with circadian rhythms.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can Viagra also go a little too far and cause long-term erections that are problematic?
Jordan Barber
You may have priapism if you take too much or in rare cases. If you have an erection over four hours, if you remember the commercial, it could be deadly because you’ll get necrotic tissue in your penis. But the treatment is ephedrine, like Sudafed, or they’ll drain your penis. That can happen. I think it’s more user error than anything, honestly, because some guys think they’re Superman when they take these things. They go a little too far and suddenly have an erection like they were 16, and you can damage the penis and everything else. But is that the medication? No, that’s user error. We’re not the smartest species on the planet.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Taking too much of a good thing.
Jordan Barber
There’s a great peptide, PT-141, which is a variation of melanin receptors and will give you a very strong erection. It’s also used by women and works really well. It’s an injectable, and the side effects are nausea in some people. But I think it works way better than PDE5s. It works on signaling as opposed to nitric oxide.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is that something you take daily, or do you take it right before intimacy?
Jordan Barber
That would be a very bad week if you took it daily. That gives you about 24 hours of usability, shall we say. But it will give an erection. Whether you even want an erection or not, anything that brushes against it, you will have one. There’s no refractory period. It might be a refractory period for your ability to ejaculate, but not for an erection. Whereas often a refractory period, which has an effect via prolactin, still plays a role in the use of PDE5s. So there’s a lot more ability to abuse substances like that. For the right occasion and right time, especially if you’re talking about performance anxiety and you just need to push through, those peptides do work really well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
They help with women as well, for the inability to have an orgasm, in that it increases sensitivity. Well, you heard it here, folks. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you tell us what your website is and how men can work with you in trying to troubleshoot what’s causing their erectile dysfunction?
Jordan Barber
I’m located in New York City, and I do one-on-one consultations in person because most of the stuff that I do is going to be mechanical, and we’re going to fix it, as you’ve understood here. You can find me on social media; I’m most active on some more than others. J. Barber, LAc. LAc stands for licensed acupuncturist. I’d be remiss not to plug that I have a new book coming out called Thinking in Chinese Medicine, and it’s kind of all the stuff we’re talking about.
Notice I didn’t talk about Chinese medicine meridians or anything like that, because Chinese medicine is still medicine, and it works. There’s the poetic language behind it, but there’s a thought process of how you analyze the body, and that’s what we just covered here. That’s what that book talks about. How to think about things in a larger picture and the interrelationship.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It is a thousand-year-old medical system, but it works very well. Still used in China and here.
Jordan Barber
Every time we say 5,000 years, the Ayurvedic people get really upset at us. There’s a big argument there. Let’s say it’s thousands of years. But either way, it’s a fascinating history when you look back into it. And we have thousands of years of history. I wrote that book with my colleague Dr. Peter Caron, who’s a phenomenal practitioner. I’m always accessible via email and on any of those platforms. You can always reach out, and I can help direct you to someone who does this stuff in your area.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What is the website again?
Jordan Barber
You can find me at drjordanbarber.com, or my clinic in the city is drbarberclinic.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good, so clear on many different underlying root causes. It’s just not a simple, quick fix, and it’s not a pill either. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Jordan Barber
I don’t think I got canceled either, so that’s great.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast, where I love having guests like Jordan come on and help give you those tips and make those distinctions that you need to make the best choices for your health because I want you to feel good, happy, and healthy. Thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
