Healing Peyronie's disease requires special patience

Making progress and wanting to see improvement with Peyronie’s disease is on every man’s mind as soon as he starts his treatment plan. To understand how this works, you really need to understand Peyronie's disease treatment philosophy. Allow me to share a metaphor that describes what I think about this “progress” issue.

Suppose you wake up one morning and your house is really cold — it's 50 degrees inside. You quickly turn on the heat. Ten minutes later you notice that your house doesn't feel any warmer. You check the thermostat again, and son of a gun, it still shows 50 degrees.

Two things are happening at this early stage of heating your home: First, you are trying to remember what the temperature felt like ten minutes earlier, and realistically you cannot do it. This is difficult because you are not trained or experienced in that kind of thing, and your body is not built – neither you nor I have a nerve system – that can detect any kind of small incremental change in temperature that would possibly take place in three minutes. Second, the thermostat on your wall is not sensitive enough to pick up such a small temperature rise that would take place in ten minutes. A scientific thermostat could pick up a fractional rise in temperature, but your standard home thermostat is not built to detect these small changes.

But, you know the furnace is on; you hear the furnace and you see the drapes moving, so you know that something is going on. You know things are going on even though you cannot detect change at this early stage. Further, you realize you are being impatient because you are uncomfortable. When you stop to consider what needs to be done to raise the temperature 15-20 degrees in order for you to be comfortable again, you realize you just have not given the furnace enough time to do the job.

Well, how much time do you have to give that furnace to do the job? A good question. The amount of time to raise the temperature one degree will be not only different from house to house, but also different from day to day in the same house. If it is really windy outside one day, or below zero one day, or if it is nighttime as compared to daytime, or if you left the back door open, all of these things make a difference in how long it will take to warm up your house. No two houses are the same, after all. So, who can predict? Does that mean you turn off the thermostat after ten minutes because the house is still cold and you are impatient? No, you just hunker down and try to be patient while things slowly and gradually happen around you.

The real problem is not that the furnace is not working, or that the house is not actually warming up ever so slightly, the real problem, my friend, is that you do not possess a good way to measure the progress you are hoping you are making from minute to minute. The problem with the reality of life is that the colder it is, the more important it is to heat up the house, the more impatient we get with that furnace, even if it is doing as good a job as it can do.

Getting back to PD, what you need to do is to accurately determine and document the size, shape, density and surface quality of your scar tissue. That can be a real challenge to do well. I examine people all day long, and I still sometimes have a difficult time grading and evaluating the condition of your Peyronie's plaque or scars. Read the section from my book, “Peyronie’s Disease Handbook” that describes in detail how to monitor the small changes in your scar and curvature as you undergo your therapy plan. It is vital that you do this. The correct way to monitor the progress is via the condition of your Peyronie's plaque, not your curved penis.

Believe me, I fully understand your impatience and urgency in wanting to get your sex life back to normal. When I was treating my own PD, it was a constant struggle to not expect too much too soon.

I am always concerned that the men I work with do not allow themselves enough time to respond to their therapy programs. Many men tell me they will wait to judge their progress after the first 30 days of care. In most cases this time horizon is way too short to be fair to anyone. When someone tells me they will give it until the end of their first supply of therapy products, I know I am dealing with someone who is not being realistic with himself or his situation.

In my work with Peyronie’s disease, I came to an interesting and logical theory about how this whole problem gets started for a lot of men. You know that trauma, a large or small injury directly to the male organ, is the usual way that Peyronie’s disease is said to get started. That makes sense, except that a lot of men swear up and down that they do not recall any injury happening.

What I think very often happens is this: A man injures himself, but there is so much time that passes between the injury and the time that he first notices any change down there that he does not put the two events together. It is because of the length of time between one thing and the other thing, that the two events are never connected. Almost like having sex and then nine months later, a baby comes out. If this is true, what this should say to you is that it takes time for the scar to develop and it will take an even longer time for the scar to heal, if it is going to.

How about another metaphor? It takes a second to break a bone, and 6-8 weeks for it to heal. I hope you get the point.

Be patient with yourself. Try to keep in mind the immense job you have undertaken and the true complexity of what you are attempting to do. Stay focused to your success.