PESHAWAR, July 29: Quacks selling purported sex medications are causing serious health problems for people.

Patients and doctors said that they included practioners of alternative medicine, including Hakims and homoeopaths.

“I have examined seven patients during the past few months who suffered from acute renal and liver-problems because of wrong medications prescribed by hakims, homeopaths and unqualified doctors for sex-related problems”, said a doctor at the Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC).

He also said that extended use of such medicine also caused sterility.

Stressing the need to know about the patients’ complete medical history, he said that and said that unqualified doctors ignored aspects like relevant investigations and treatment and prescribed three to four opium-based drugs to the patients, putting them at a razor’s edge.

He said that sex-related problems were often caused by other diseases, such as diabetics, hypertension, anxiety, depression and heart-related problems. There were also other causes which should be taken into account while treating patients with such problems.

Hakims and homeopaths, he said, often prescribe testosterone (hormone) and steroids that do more harm than good. Quacks usually used substandard drugs in the loosely packed pills that caused more problems than good, he said.

Recently, the provincial health department has issued a notification labelling a Hakim fraud and warning people against visiting his clinic, but no further action was taken. Nevertheless, it has analyzed contents of the drugs collected from his clinic and had found them laced with opium and steroids.

A sexologist working at the Hayatabad Medical Complex attributed the rise in the sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDS to the non-availability of the qualified people and lack of public health education.

Some of these doctors claimed to be professors at universities that existed nowhere in the world, still the gullible people visited their clinics, because they had no other option, he said.

At quacks’ clinics, patients were given drugs in packaging which did not indicate information about its contents, date of manufacturing, expiry and price.

The doctor told this correspondent that psychological and nervous problems were also causes of sex problems.

“I paid Rs12,000 as consultation fee to a doctor in Lahore, but the problem persisted despite taking the prescribed drugs regularly,” said a young man. He said he had been visiting a number of hakims and so-called doctors for the past five years without any improvement in his condition.

He said that the raw material used in sex drugs was mainly imported from China and India and its manufacturers were mainly concentrated in Lahore’s small-scale pharmaceutical industry.

They also contained heavy metals that caused numerous chronic ailments. He said that sex problems were curable, provided patients consulted the right doctor at the right time.

The government, he said, needed to formulate laws to check the sale of homeopathic and herbal medicines, because the Drug Act does not cover such medicines.