Viagra craze gives a 'boost' to Penn urologist's reputation

Penn Urology Professor Gregory Broderick has a problem. The difficulty is that Broderick, the director of the Penn Center for Male Sexual Dysfunction, has been at the center of the biggest sexual revolution since the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s but doesn't know how to reflect that fact on his resume. Since late March, Broderick has helped lead a national dialogue over Viagra, the new impotence drug from Pfizer Inc. that has thousands of men lining up at their doctors' offices. Within two weeks' time, Broderick was cited by such publications as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Time, and The Guardian, a London newspaper. "In this field, when you're putting together your c[urriculum] v[itae] -- and I update my c.v. on a regular basis -- you update it as to peer-reviewed papers, chapters and lectures given," he said in a May interview. "I don't have a media section yet. So I guess I'll start a media section." While admitting that he has saved all of his press clippings, Broderick recognizes that his "15 minutes of fame" have likely expired. "It's very invigorating and very exciting to appreciate that someone wants to know what you know and wants your opinion," he said. "But all of a sudden when that stops, you feel wanting, you feel a little bit hungry and you realize that wasn't real anyway and you go back to being the person you were." "I can sympathize with the folks in Hollywood when they're not getting the calls anymore," he added. What made Broderick a celebrity in the field of urology was the Food and Drug Administration's approval this spring of Viagra, a small, blue, rounded-diamond-shaped tablet with the remarkable ability to enhance blood flow to the pelvic area. The result, Broderick said, is relief from "organic erectile dysfunction" -- or impotence. Broderick, 41, has headed the Center for Male Sexual Dysfunction for the last eight years. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, he trained at UCSF under Tom Lue, "one of the big gurus in male sexual dysfunction." According to Broderick, the Viagra craze is largely the serendipitous result of a pharmacological accident. "Most of the time, companies invest millions and millions of dollars in research and development of a product," he said. "In this case, Pfizer basically lucked into a situation here. They were developing drugs for chest pains -- cardiac drugs. It was being studied in one of their divisions in England and the men taking the drug really weren't having improvement in their cardiac symptoms but at the end of the study they refused to give back the tablets." "An investigator asked them why and they said, 'Well, we're getting better erections than we've had in years,' " Broderick said. And since that time, Broderick and his colleagues have been very busy urologists. While 3,000 men, aged 19 to 87, were involved in New York-based Pfizer's clinical trials for Viagra, more than 200,000 men sought prescriptions for the drug -- in only its first week on the market. Broderick alone was hand-writing between 25 and 30 prescriptions a day for the first several weeks that the drug was available. "The nurses and I were going crazy," he said. Broderick maintained that despite the huge demand for Viagra, strict quality-control measures are in place. "I'd like to emphasize that every physician that writes this prescription is obligated to either see the patient and take a history? or have discussed with him in the past issues of erectile ability," he said. However, he sees a great potential for abuse in the craze the drug has stirred up. Even as smugglers have tried bringing the drug into countries where it is not approved, Broderick noted problems in Philadelphia. "The street price for a Viagra tablet is between $14 and $18 a tablet," he said. "There gave been attempts to hijack supplies here in town. It's kind of like the black market in cigarettes." He cited young people looking to "experiment" and patients with non-physical sources of impotence as the primary groups who might turn to illicit sources of Viagra. But under approved conditions for men with a history of physical impotence -- resulting from diabetes, cigarette smoking or heart problems -- the drug has proven remarkably effective, Broderick said. In clinical tests, 70 percent of men achieved enough erectile function to "go back to having spontaneous sex" with few side effects. "For me, the gold standard is an erection that is unbending and will last for 20 minutes," Broderick explained. But he warned that men with heart problems that require nitroglycerine should not use Viagra, as the combination is potentially lethal. With the new "wonder drug" raising so many questions and so much controversy regarding its use, the media has brought the issue to the front of the national dialogue on men's health. "I think that's just a sign of the times," Broderick said. "It's an indication that male sexual dysfunction is now in the center in terms of mainstream medicine. And that's where it should have been all along." Despite his notoriety in the field, Broderick almost did not go into urology. Instead, he was on course to be a heart-and-chest surgeon, but was "put off by the fact that the patients being operated on didn't always do that well." "I was very inspired by the fact that urologists have a nice mix of a practice in terms of surgery and medical management," he said. "And although we're working on very very elderly men and women, we're working on improving the quality of their lives and generally they do very well." After a few weeks of doing the media rounds to discuss Viagra, the sudden end of his "15 minutes of fame" took Broderick by surprise. "The week they stopped calling I came to work and I got a little nervous because there were no messages from any major news services," he said.

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