One of the rather more unfortunate side effects o f surgery to remove a growth in the prostate, is the phenomenon politely called erectile dysfunction. Put simply, when a surgeon is waving a sharp knife around “down there” and that knife has to cut away a growth, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid cutting through some of the nervous system that makes sex possible. A significant proportion of men find they can no longer get or maintain an erection. Sex becomes a memory. Except that some clever people in Canada have been trying out Levitra in a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial. The study involved some 423 participants in 87 hospitals in Europe, the U.S., Canada and South Africa over a period of some two-and-a-half years. The present system calls for one of the PDE5 inhibitors to be given every night at a low dose. This tested the response of men taking Levitra at the standard dose whenever they felt like attempting sexual intercourse. The results clearly show a higher success rate than taking the drug every night. So the moral of this news story (published in the exciting journal European Urology) is that even if a guy with a knife cuts chunks off your manhood, Levitra can still bring life back to the old dog (or young dog if you were unlucky enough to have prostate cancer as a younger man).