A group of GPs has called for a rethink of the NHS’s current guidelines regarding the treatment of erectile dysfunction, saying that the current policies are ‘discriminatory.’ Pulse, a weekly medical publication, has reported that as GPs get ready for a flood of patients seeking the new one-a-day treatment recently approved by the European medicine regulatory body, questions are starting to be raised as to the availability of free treatment.
At the moment, only 15% of patients are entitled to free treatment and the current Department of Health recommendation is that those patients should have enough pills for a sexual encounter once a week though as many as one in ten men suffer from the condition. Patients must have one of 12 conditions to be entitled to free treatment. The new treatment is a lower-dose version of the popular pill Cialis, which taken once a day would allow for spontaneous sexual encounters whenever desired.
Professor Mike Kirby, a former urology specialist and visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire said that he did “not think it is right to keep free treatment restricted full stop, and it’s a great shame that it has not been reviewed.” Another doctor, Patrick Wright, said that he found it odd that someone with mild diabetes was eligible while someone with cardiovascular disease was not.
The Department of Health said that while they believed that one treatment per week was suitable for most patients, it was recommended that doctors treat on a case-by-case basis, meaning that some patients might be prescribed more than one treatment a week.