Penile Injections: Tips for Self-Injection

“So today we’re going to talk about how to do an intracavernosal or penile injection. Obviously you’ll need your bottle of medication and your syringe, which you should have received from your local pharmacy.

The other thing you’ll need is some alcohol swabs. The alcohol swabs are used to clean off the top of your bottle of medication, the rubber stopper. What we do is we remove the alcohol swab. We cleanse the rubber stopper with some alcohol. That cleans off any bacteria.

You grab your syringe, which has two removable pieces. The bottom piece comes off, which reveals the stopper, the orange cap on top will reveal the needle.

If you’re using an injection, everybody will have their own sort of dose that they’re going to use in terms of volume for the injection. The easiest way to draw up an injection is to pull down to the number that you’re using.

In this example, we’re going to use 50. It’s the top line of the stopper that judges the volume that’s in the syringe, not the bottom line of the stopper.

At that point, you will remove the orange cap, which reveals the needle. The thing you have to understand about the needle is, it’s very flimsy, so we have to take great care in terms of not bending the needle.

Hold the needle very close to the needle hub. You will go straight into the rubber stopper with the needle. You will then depress the stopper, pushing air into the bottle.

At this point, we’re going to flip the bottle over and we’re going to draw down on the syringe.

As we pull down, fluid will start to fill into the syringe. You want to pull down slowly as to not gain any air bubbles. Pull past the 50-unit mark, go to 55 or 60 units. At that point with the needle still inside the bottle, you will push up to remove any air bubbles.

Once you get to 50 units, you’ll pull the needle out and you are done.

Hi, I’m Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of Maze Men’s Health. The purpose of this video is to teach you how to use the auto injector for the penile injections.

So the first thing to notice about this injection technique is the syringe that we’re using. You will take a preloaded syringe that has the needle connected already, which is the prescription we will write for you. It’s a 29 or 30-gauge needle, which means it’s very fine. And of course the finer it is, the less you feel it when it goes in.

Then we take the auto injector, which is basically a spring loaded device that pushes the needle in automatically. You have to cock it so that the spring is loaded. Then you basically drop the syringe into the auto injector and put this over. And now in about 20 seconds you have basically loaded your auto injector.

Now let’s turn to the penis and understand the anatomy so you know where to put the needle. The penis has basically three chambers. You have your two erection chambers which are running along the side and then the urethra which runs along the bottom, you want to get it into one of the two erection chambers. Fortunately, about 80% of the penis is made up of the erection chambers, so even if you were to do this blindly, you would get into the erection chambers the vast majority of the time.

We don’t want you to do it blindly. We want you to get in almost always, if not always. So the next step is to put your penis on stretch and then you’re going to aim for the sides. Just to again review. If this is the face of a clock, this would be 12 o’clock, this is six o’clock, you want to go between nine and 10 o’clock or two and three o’clock and it really, you can use the same side. You’re just going to alternate position so that you’re not going into the same place all the time. You pick your position, trying to avoid any of the superficial veins, push this lightly up against the penis and you press the button. Within two or three seconds, the fluid will be injected.

You remove this, and then you’re going to compress.

I’m a huge fan of the penile injections and I’m a huge fan of using the auto injector to do them. We’ve had many patients who really, the idea just totally was so unappealing to them, or they’d actually failed in other offices. And when we switched over to this technique, had been using this in my office for more than 20 years. So the way to go.