Treating Erectile Dysfunction with Inflatable Penile Prosthesis with Dr. Adam Oppenheim

I’m Dr. Adam Oppenheim, I’m a urologist with St. Pete Urology. So we offer a procedure called the inflatable penile prosthesis for patients who either don’t respond well to the more conservative measures or they’re not able to tolerate it. You know, sometimes the injections are very painful and they don’t really tolerate it very well. So we offer the penile implant procedure. This is an outpatient procedure that usually takes about an hour to complete and the patient is sent home after the operation. They return about four to six weeks later to have the device activated when after healing has happened and it’s ready to use.

So the procedure is called a three-piece inflatable penile prosthesis. It’s called three-piece for a good reason. It’s composed of three components. The components are an activation pump that sits in the patient’s scrotum, two cylinders that sit in the shaft of the penis, and a fluid-filled reservoir that sits in the abdominal space. All three of these components are placed through one small incision between the penis and the scrotum. So the way the device works is when the patient wants to have an erection, he presses the activation button, which sits in the patient’s scrotum. This sends fluid from the abdominal space reservoir into the two cylinders in the shaft of the penis, creating a natural-like erection.

When the patient’s done, he hits the deactivation button, which is also on the same pump in the scrotum, which releases the fluid back from the cylinders in the penis into the reservoir. Unlike remembering to take medicines for rectal dysfunction, the penile implant procedure offers a degree of spontaneity that resembles more of a natural-like erection and is a more permanent solution to erectile dysfunction.