Hey Dr Sue — Is Male Impotence Normal?

Yes, yes it is.

Impotence is the term I hear people use for what is clinically called erectile dysfunction or erectile disorder. Some people just use the term ED.

This is where I can throw lots of numbers out there, and those numbers are what some people would use to define if it’s “normal” or not.

But I’m not going to, and the reason is that the while there are many studies that include information on ED, those studies don’t always use the same criteria to define what ED is.

One set of criteria comes from the DSM-5, a manual that is often used by health care practitioners to diagnose patients. The diagnosis of ED in the DSM-5 has a time frame that’s linked to it — and that time time frame is 6 months.

So under the DSM, for someone to be considered having problems with impotence, they have to have the problem for at last 6 months.

Most people don’t realize that, and so if they have a problem getting and maintaining an erection once or twice they assume that there is a problem.

And there might very well be a problem, it just might not be ED.

People have problems getting erections for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they’re tired, or they’re drunk, or stressed, or taking a medication that’s preventing them…