AltMedAngel: Alternative Medicine Angel

Alternative Treatment of Peyronie’s Disease

By Theodore R. Herazy, DC, LAc, Dipl. Ac.

There is a large and silent epidemic of Peyronie’s (pay-row-NEEZ) disease occurring right now among men all over the world.  This is such a significant problem because no one knows – and may never know – how big a problem Peyronie’s disease (PD) is for men.   PD is a medical condition that is surrounded with unknowns:  there is no known cause, no accepted medical treatment, and there is no specific pattern of illness since it is extremely variable from one case to the next.  For all these reasons, and the fact that it is extremely resistant to treatment, it has been called “the doctor’s nightmare”.  

PD is a serious health problem of unknown origin affecting the penis, characterized by the presence of a nodule of scar tissue, called a plaque, under the skin along the shaft of the penis.  Sometimes there is one plaque and other times there can be several, causing the penis to bend painfully, often leading to erectile dysfunction and impotence.  To understand the bending of the penis, imagine a small piece of tape that is stuck to a balloon, and is then blown up.  The balloon will bend in the direction of the tape because it will prevent full expansion of the balloon.  The mechanics between a balloon with a piece of tape on it and the Peyronie’s scar along the shaft of the penis are very similar.

Figure 1 –  This diagram shows a fibrous plaque, or scar, of Peyronie's disease on the top portion of shaft.  Bending of penis upward is in response to presence of scar that prevents full expansion.

Peyronie’s disease was described in 1743 by Francois Gigot de la Peyronie, a noted French physician and surgeon, and the personal physician to French King Louis XV.  He described a strange problem shared by three men with "rosary beads of scar tissue to cause an upward curvature of the penis during erection."  Over the last 375 years there has not been a great amount of information gained about PD, compared to other disease and illness. 

Four Centuries of Mystery 

PD defies study and research because it sometimes just disappears without any treatment, and each case of PD can be wildly different than most others.  The many variables within any case of PD prevent any meaningful measure to create an average case for comparison. 

Sometimes the disease appears gradually and is hardly noticeable, and other times it starts suddenly with a great pain and huge bend in the penis. Sometimes it starts after a minor direct injury, and sometimes no injury or contact can be recalled.  Sometimes hereditary factors are present, and sometimes none at all.  Sometimes there is evidence that an autoimmune disorder might be the cause of the problem, and in other cases not at all.  Sometimes there is one scar, sometimes several, and sometimes there is no scar that can be felt although there is slight to great curvature and distortion of the penis.  Sometimes the scar is soft, sometimes the scar is hard, sometimes the scar cannot be felt, sometimes the scar circles the penis and creates an hourglass deformity, and sometimes the scar becomes calcified like a bone.  Sometimes there is no pain, sometimes slight pain, sometimes great pain.  Sometimes the curvature is minimal, and sometimes the penis can bend around like a cane or twist like a corkscrew.  Sometimes the disease just disappears in the early stages of development never to return, other times it recurs several times, and sometimes it just never goes away.  Everything about the course of the condition is variable, making it rather impossible to know if, or when, a treatment is having any effect on the problem.    

Treatment of Peyronie’s Disease: Quiet Desperation

Most men who develop PD are amazed that so little is known about such a life-altering condition and that there is so little information about successful treatment.  For many men, having PD is an exercise in learning to ignore the problem since there are no known treatments within traditional medicine.     

While many drugs and therapies have been studied, all research has resulted in inconclusive and contradictory results.  Within all this contradiction, three different therapy directions have emerged:

Drug – To date there is no “proven” drug treatment for PD, owing primarily to a lack of understanding of the cause and progress of the disease.  Many different drugs have been studied by researchers, such as verapamil, collagenase, various steroids, and calcium channel blockers, but all are still considered unproven. 

Surgery – Surgery has been called the only approved treatment of PD, although the usual comment is that it results in “some” success with PD.  Because of limited success it is best used as a last resort when pain or impotence become extreme.   Because of the theory that the plaque of PD often results from trauma, men often resist surgical scar removal, fearing that more scar tissue will result directly from surgery. 

Alternative Medicine – Because of lack of reproducible success treating PD with usual medical methods and techniques, alternative and complimentary medicine methods are becoming more popular due to the following reasons:

1.    Same or better success in treatment of PD than standard drugs.

2.    No side effects.

3.    Safety of naturally occurring substances that increase immune response and support the health of local tissue to allow repair to occur. 

4.    Easily available without prescription.

5.    Low cost.

6.    Can be used in conjunction with other treatments and therapies.

Not a Matter of Luck

The scar of PD can be thought of as an expression of the health of the body.  Like an ulcer, it is seen as the result of abnormal body chemistry and physiology.  Therefore, alternative treatment of PD attempts to improve the chemistry and physiology of the abnormal tissue in and around the scar.  Using this philosophy, the alternative methods that use natural products, nutrients and techniques are intended to improve the chemistry and physiology both systemically as well as locally in the scar area.

It seems logical that the man whose PD spontaneously disappears has a better healing capacity and better health in general, than the other men whose PD never improves.   Getting over PD spontaneously is probably not a matter of luck.  Applying common sense and generally available knowledge about health and healing provides the foundation for a natural conservative treatment plan to improve your chances to survive PD as a winner.  The goal is to try to get healthier so that the body will be able to heal itself. 

Conservative Treatment Supports the Ability to Heal

For the many silent and suffering men who have PD, the message is simply that there is more that can be done to treat this dreaded condition than standard medicine has to offer.   Although the treatment of PD with alternative medicine is currently not a mainstream idea, this approach is being followed by many who are achieving positive results that were not possible with other types of medical care.   Alternative medicine advocates use simple and natural products and therapies that are essential for health and well being, and as a way of increasing the ability of the body to heal and repair. 

A man with a painful penis bent like a cane is very eager to help himself.   He typically does not mind that alternative medical therapies are not yet fully accepted by the AMA.  The use of alternative medicine to treat PD is a reasonable attempt to improve the eventual outcome of treatment by faithfully and aggressively using safe – but currently unproven – conservative methods that are based on sound science and common sense.

Here is just one example of the successful use of alternative medicine to treat a difficult case of PD:   

I first noticed a small bump on the side of my penis that I thought was a varicose vein.   I didn’t think too much about it because everything else was no different than usual.  Then after a few weeks I started to get the first signs that something was wrong.

The first thing that concerned me was a slight dull ache on the left side of my penis one day; in less than a week the pain was severe and almost constant.  Then I noticed the first of four eventual scar nodules.  The first that appeared was the largest, about the size of an almond, followed by two pea-sized scars, and the last one was half the size of the first almond-sized nodule.  The bend started after I discovered the first large scar.  After the first week the bend went from 5º to over 45º in a little over two weeks.  

Because of the pain and the bumps in my penis I could not feel comfortable about sex.  Soon I was unable to get an erection.   With all the tension and worry, and loss of our sex life, I got a divorce early in the second year of the PD.  I was feeling pretty depressed by it all, and thought about suicide a few times.

My pain was constant the whole time.  Sometimes it was better than others, and sometimes it was so bad I could not sleep or do my usual work, but it was always there.

My medical doctor did not have much to offer me.  At first he just told me to do nothing and wait to see if the scars went away by themselves.  Not only did my problem not get better during this time, but in addition to the 45º bend, my penis became slightly twisted as well.  I was really upset and fearful that it was just going to keep on getting worse.  I went to a specialist who prescribed two different expensive medicines that did nothing for any part of my problem.  He said I was a good candidate for surgery.

At the lowest point of my life, I began to look on the Internet for some information and answers about this problem that was ruining my life.   Most of what I read was standard stuff about how this medicine or that medicine did not work, and that all of the really bad cases of PD eventually had surgery to remove the scar, followed by plastic surgery.  I soon learned that while surgery was the best that the medical profession had to offer for PD, it was not a great answer.  I also read about horror stories of even more scar formation as a result of the surgery to correct the initial problem.  I decided that I did not want to take the risk of surgery making a bad problem even worse. 

This is about the time that I stumbled onto some information about using alternative medicine to treat PD.  After suffering for almost four years, I was really excited to think there was maybe some hope for me.  The more I read the more it made sense to me.  The part that I liked the most was that there were few, if any, risks with the use of natural vitamins and enzymes and energy techniques.  I got busy and started to get some relief and actual improvement for the first time since my problem started.

Peyronie’s Disease Institute (PDI) has individual sections that explain in detail how to use many different supplements and therapies to treat PD conservatively.  On this website I learned how to use Vitamin E, vitamin C, copper, MSM, PABA, quercetin, carnitine, DMSO, herbs, enzymes, acupuncture and even massage exercises to help myself.  To learn more about how each of these therapies can help PD, click on the link above,  

A lot of people try to use only vitamin E or only enzymes to treat their PD, and this is the reason for their failure.  On the PDI website I learned that to be successful you have to use several treatments simultaneously, and they must be used correctly.  I also found the Institute to have the most information in one place about treating this problem, and it worked for me almost right away. 

When I started using my own alternative medicine treatment, the first thing that improved within the first two weeks was that the pain went from being constant for almost four years to just occasional.  After another two weeks the pain just went away.  After the first two months of care the scars began to soften, then get smaller, and finally just disappeared one by one.  During this time the bend started to disappear also.

After almost two years of alternative treatment, I continue to be pain-free, I have no twist in my penis anymore, I can get firm erections, and there is maybe a 5º remaining of the original 45º bend.  I think if I continue with my personal treatment plan I can even improve on this last small curve.      -- A.F.  -  Georgia

One of the reassuring aspects of this kind of treatment is that if, after using an aggressive alternative medical program, there is less than complete repair and healing (as can happen) then surgery can always be used as a last resort if needed.

Learn About the Conservative Treatment of PD         

The treatment of PD with alternative medicine methods is a large and interesting subject, and really cannot be described completely in this space.  To learn more about the treatment of Peyronie’s disease with natural alternative medicine and integrative methods, visit the Peyronies Disease Institute web site.  Here you will find an alternative medicine website devoted to the non-drug and non-surgical treatment of “the bent penis disease”.  

The links in this article take you to the links page.  

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