Men’s Journal

May 2001 (p80)
Herbal Viagra Goes Legit

The flood of junk e-mail about herbal Viagra may be annoying as hell, but before you use your filtering program to make sure you never see those two words together again, you might be interested to know that a top impotence researcher just completed a study on one brand – and he thinks the stuff works great. University of California, San Francisco urologist Dr. Tom Lue fed BetterMan (888-686-2698 or bettermannow.com) to impotent rats and found that they all regained their sexual potency. Although he’s still unclear about the mechanism – it appears that one of the product’s 18 traditional Chinese herbs blocks the same troublesome enzyme that Viagra does. Lue plans to do human studies soon to see whether the centuries of glowing reports from China about the herbs’ effect on male libido bear up under scrutiny. For now, he says, the ingredients are benign enough that if you’re trying to avoid the potential side effects or inconvenience of prescription Viagra, BetterMan probably can’t hurt – and it might help quite a bit.

– DISPATCH compiled by Jason Adams