Animals still under threat
The Viagra hype worldwide has stretched from saving not only suffering men, but also the world's suffering animals - those like rhinoceroses and tigers that are endangered because, the story goes, Asian doctors use them to boost manhood. With Viagra, they won't need tiger or rhino parts: hurrah, a Western drug rescues even the dumb animal kingdom from the Eastern slayers.
But conservationists and traditional doctors reckon the dumb animals here are the humans who believe in the myth that Oriental medicine mainly boosts sexual prowess. Viagra, they say, will not help any animal facing extinction, while the idea that it will may actually harm them.
'This is wrong, totally wrong,' says Judy Mills, director of Traffic East Asia, the trade monitoring arm of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. 'In all the time I've been talking to traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, I've never found any evidence of it.' Some people do believe eating tiger penises will boost their own, she says, but 'that's not why the tigers are killed. They are killed for their bones,' which are used to treat arthritis, she says.
Lee Jok Keng, educational development executive and practising herbalist for leading Asian medicine firm Eu Yan Sang, says such beliefs harm attempts to save endangered wildlife because offended doctors with whom Traffic is trying to build a rapport are liable to turn their backs on Western-inspired protection efforts.
'The [traditional Chinese medicine] community is constantly annoyed with publications that constantly give the wrong impression to the public,' he says. 'It has at least 2,500 years of recorded history, and the body of knowledge is huge. What the public read is just a small portion and [stories about] aphrodisiacs stick very well. And of course sex is a popular subject.' While rhino horn is used to treat life-threatening fever, Mr Lee knows only of the seahorse being used often for sexual treatment. Even then, it is more commonly used to treat backache and a particular form of asthma.
The myth may have grown because many preparations are used to 'boost the kidney yang', an all-encompassing term that can mean improving sexual prowess, but usually refers to other treatments, such as for heart ailments. 'We don't have any equivalent term for aphrodisiac,' he says.
