David,
I wasn't going to post this, but for perspective it is well done.
Our two cents will matter little to the vagaries of this market. In the long run this brief respite in price appreciation will be but a longing dreamlike memory of a time when this stock was as cheap as it got and we may wish we had gotten more! Most on this thread are well aware of facts vs. conjecture/hype around this medication and in regard of this I present more facts pertaining to sexual activity- as it may relate to Viagra.
The last half of the article is particularly insightful, regarding attitudes and statistics.
Viagra's Bright Success Spotlights Dark Side Of Sex
Dow Jones Online News, Monday, June 01, 1998 at 01:12
(Published on Sunday, May 31, 1998 at 22:04)
By Nancy Ann Jeffrey and Rochelle Sharpe, Staff Reporters of The Wall
Street Journal
As a million men have rushed to take the impotence pill Viagra in its
just nine weeks on the market, the biggest drug craze since Prozac is
spotlighting a new medical risk: Thousands of patients with severe heart
disease are now able to resume intercourse, an intense physical exertion
for such a vulnerable population.
Since Pfizer Inc. began marketing Viagra in early April, the sex pill
has breathed passion into the lives of countless couples long anguished
by an inability to have sex. But its overnight popularity raises concern
that the men who need it most are those least able to withstand the
rigors of sex - millions of men for whom impotence is merely a side
effect of heart disease and other serious health problems.
Of seven known deaths of men taking Viagra, five died of a stroke or
heart attack during sex or shortly thereafter. All are believed to have
had a history of heart disease or other cardiovascular problems. A sixth
man died because of a bad combination with a nitrate drug commonly
prescribed to heart patients. The cause of death in the seventh case is
unresolved.
This intersection of sex and death may pose a dilemma for doctors:
Should they prescribe Viagra even to patients with the weakest hearts if
these men demand it? " This is an ethical issue," says Richard Conti,
chief of cardiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in
Gainesville, Fla., and past president of the American College of
Cardiology. "Should we really be advising our patients who are at high
risk to use Viagra just because they want to have sexual relations?"
The university's Health Science Center in Jacksonville is
investigating the death last month of a man in his 50s who went into
cardiac arrest while having sex shortly after he took Viagra. He had a
history of serious heart disease.
The issue is at the forefront as almost 10,000 urologists from the
U.S. and overseas gather in San Diego this week for the annual meeting
of the American Urological Association. Attendance was up almost 50%
from a year ago as urologists attended a standing-room-only session on
impotence yesterday morning, taking breaks to trade the latest Viagra
jokes and discuss the tradeoffs between sex and risk.
The Pfizer sales booth at the San Diego Convention Center was
brimming with dozens of doctors, from China to Turkey to Argentina and
other markets around the world where Viagra isn't yet sold but where
black-market pills can fetch $30 to $100 a pop. They lined up for Viagra
brochures, notepads in the shape of the pill and lapel pins picturing
the tablets. They begged for free samples. (None are available.)
For American patients, the Viagra phenomenon is shaping up as an
extraordinary real-life science experiment: What happens when a million
men who had stopped having sex resume all of a sudden? The early results
offer a reminder that sex brings problems as well as pleasure.
"VIAGRA-MONY," blared the banner headline in the New York Post after
a Long Island woman sued her 10-year live-in mate for $2 million plus
damages, charging that Viagra helped the 70-year-old man have sex for
the first time in four years and that he left her, with pills in hand,
two days later to move in with another woman.
In this frenzy, few men clamoring for Viagra are eager to embrace
such downers as heart risks. "I'm not worried. After sex, I feel better
than before," says Murray, 59 years old, who lives in the Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., area and has diabetes and bouts of high blood
pressure. He had been impotent for the past few years but, since
starting on Viagra six weeks ago, he and his wife have resumed sexual
relations at least once a week.
Murray, who asked that his full name be withheld, joined a health
club but never goes. He played an hour of tennis recently and thought he
would collapse with exhaustion. But when he ponders nights on Viagra, a
heart attack is the last thing on his mind. "I don't care about living
forever," he says. "And I couldn't think of a better way to go."
The advent of Viagra, doctors say, has sent thousands to the doctor's
office for the first time in years, affording physicians the opportunity
to catch long-undiagnosed problems of heart disease, diabetes, prostate
cancer and other conditions that also cause impotency.
Some 30 million American men are impotent, and serious cardiovascular
problems are believed to be involved in more than 60% of the cases. It
isn't known why these diseases render men unable to have sex, except
that the impotence neutralizes a source of physical exertion that heart
patients might be better off without.
Viagra's label carries warnings aimed at cardiovascular patients. One
cautions a gainst combining Viagra with nitrate medications, the
contraindication that has resulted in at least one death. On the drug's
package insert, distributed to pharmacists and physicians, Pfizer also
warns: "There is a degree of cardiac risk associated with sexual
activity; therefore, physicians may wish to consider the cardiovascular
status of their patients prior to initiating any treatment for erectile
dysfunction."
The question is whether doctors or patients will decide where to draw
the line. "It's not that the pill is bad, it's that some doctors are
prescribing it without a careful examination" to patients who shouldn't
be on the drug, says Arnold Melman, president of the society for the
study of impotence and an impotence specialist at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine in New York.
But a doctor who refuses also knows his patient could well get the
drug from another physician. The urge to get hold of Viagra has also
added a new dimension of disinformation: sometimes patients lie. "I've
literally yanked the prescription out of their hands because they lied
to me," says urologist William Steers of the University of Virginia
Medical School, who is presenting new research on Viagra's potency at
the conference.
He worries that his patients might fib about whether they take
nitroglycerin tablets, which would put them at risk of death in taking
both prescriptions. He calls their cardiologists while they sit in his
office to double-check.
The risk of a heart attack or stroke during sex arises in much the
same way as i t does during a run in the park. Typically, when a man has
sex, his heartbeat races from 80 beats to 150 beats per minute, his
blood pressure shoots up 66% to a systolic reading of 200, and his
adrenaline increases threefold. The extra adrenaline can cause a blood
clot, which can lead to a stroke or heart attack; the increased blood
pressure can cause a blood vessel in the brain to burst, resulting in a
stroke, says James Muller, director of the Gill Heart Institute of the
University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.
To be sure, in heart patients the increased risk posed by sex is less
than the risk of playing tennis, jogging or carrying firewood, Dr.
Muller says. For a 50-year-old man with heart disease, the chances of
having a nonfatal heart attack in an hour in which he has intercourse
are close to 30 in one million, compared with a risk of 10 in a million
for that same man in an hour when he isn't having sex. Add to that the
possibilities of sudden cardiac death or stroke, and the chances that
sex will induce a serious cardiovascular event rise to 90 in a million,
still relatively low.
But if a man is sedentary, that picture changes for the worse.
Sedentary people who exert themselves increase their risk of heart
attack 100-fold, so the chances of a nonfatal heart attack for a
sedentary 50-year-old man with heart disease in the hour he has sex rise
to three in 1,000. That is three times the risk involved in a cardiac
catheterization, a common type of heart test, every time that man has
sex. "People ought to think twice about that type of risk," Dr. Muller
says. |
