you may have heard of something called horny goat wheat or yohimbe being touted as supplements that help boost erections so if you want to learn the science behind these supplements and do they actually work make sure to stick around till the end of this video I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and in today's video I'm going to dive deep into the science behind horny goatweed and yoim beam two supplements which may or may not improve erections horny goatweed yes horny goatweed I love this name um so this is derived from a plant called epimedium gland of florum and it's actually named because they noticed that goats ate the plant and had aphrodesiac effects and so they called it horny goatweed now the active ingredient in this epimedium plant is iin and iin is essentially similar to a pde5 inhibitor so just like the action in tadalfil or selenophile it has similar activity it's also been suggested that it might enhance smooth muscle proliferation and may be beneficial for men who have refractory or treatment refractory Ed because of damage of their endothelial cells like things like high blood pressure or diabetes this iar's also been thought to maybe increase nitric oxide availability but it also has poor bioavailability poor absorption and a short halflife now interestingly even though you probably see this in a lot of supplements it's not been studed in a randomized control trial so I don't really have good quality data to to share with you and there's actually some side effects potentially with horny goatweed it can include things like dizziness vomiting dry mouth thirst and nose beds and if you take too much of it it can cause things like spasms and seizure and even breathing problems so ultimately based on the fact that there's not a lot of data on this despite the name being very exciting and sounding very good I would not recommend taking this one yet so the next supplement is yimi and yimi was actually used quite commonly before seleny and tadalfil came on the market now it's extracted from the bark of an African tree and it's thought to work by working on Alpha 2 receptors and antagonizing them in 1998 there was a metaanalysis that showed it was generally effective for erectile dysfunction compared to Placebo however it it has some significant side effects that are concerning and I'll get into those and So within the studies there's about four different studies that I've looked at three of them were crossover studies and meaning that they took some Placebo and then crossed over and it only looked at men with psychogenic erectile dysfunction and they measured something called nocturnal penal Essence and so essentially they wanted to see if men had more erections at night and were they more firm and lasting longer and what they found was that there was a statistically significant Improvement in nocturnal penal tesin in all of the studies and they they took this supplement anywhere from 10 weeks to 2 months and they got anywhere between 18 to 36 Mig of yohimbe so as I mentioned the side effects are pretty concerning and that can include things like high blood pressure increased heart rate manic reactions bronos spasm palpitations insomnia anxiety irritability shivering sweating nausea flushing and headaches and this is because it's working on these adic receptors that are in the brain and the most commonly people are feeling anxiety and agitation but some of these are really serious side effects you definitely don't want to take them with any medications that are anti-depressants or antis psychotics or if you have any bleeding conditions liver failure renal failure seizures diabetes heart disease so basically it's very few people who should even take this supplement as it is and I would say the data is not really quite that compelling now interestingly there was a more recent study looking at the amount of Yohimbe in supplements based on what they said on the bottle interesting almost 34s of them didn't even label how much was in the actual supplement and of the ones that did label the dose could be anywhere from 20% of what they actually put on the label to almost 125% of what they put on the label so again really another reason to be weary of some of these supplements hope you guys enjoyed this episode if you did make sure to subscribe and share this Channel with your friends and as always we're going to take care of yourself yourself because you're worth it