Home Remedies For Premature Ejaculation With Dr. Charles Runels

This podcast is for you. The modern man. I'm Dr. Anne Truong, your host. I'm an intimate health medical doctor and best selling author of the book Erectile Dysfunction Fix. I'll do a deep dive into sexual health and performance and how it affects men of all ages and backgrounds. So let's get started and be sure to visit my website@sexualhealthformenpodcast.com for more information and resources from the show. See you on the inside. Well, hello, I am here today with a good friend and my mentor, Dr. Charles Runnels. And I have the honor of knowing him since 2014, I believe, and we I'm looking forward to having him on this show and it's going to be fantastic fun and I'd like to give you a little brief biography and this will not do him any honor, but we'll make it brief. To summarize all his achievement, he is actually an emergency room physician trained in University of Alabama in Birmingham and he is trained in internal medicine and also in research. He is well versed in endocrinology, cosmetic medicine and sexual medicine. He is published in multiple peer reviewed scientific publication, in hormone replacement therapy, sexual medicine, immunology and hypertension, and in cosmetic medicine as well. He is the originator and the founder of the vampire facelift, the prior push shot, the old shot, and the founder of the Cellular Medicine association, which I am a proud member of. And he's the one that taught me all those procedures in 2014. It has really changed the way I look at doing regenerative medicine and in sexual health and have actually changed the trajectory of how I practice regenerative medicine from musculoskeletal orthopedic medicine to sexual health. So over the years now he has trained over 8,000 physicians on sexual medicine and cosmetic medicine, over 50 countries in his method and he is still training. He told me that over the years he maybe missed two training period or all his travels and everything. He's a dedicated educator. He is. But first and foremost, and I know this for sure, is a loving father of three sons and a grandfather of one grandson and one expecting in July. And he lives in Fairhope, Alabama with his family. I am honored to have Dr. Charles Reynolds here.

Well, you're too kind, Anne. I know that before we ever met you were teaching and providing regenerative therapies with stem cells and other strategies. So I'm honored to be on your show.

Well, we have so much to talk about and he and I can probably sit for hours talking about everything and catching up on life. But today I wanted to kind of focus on his new book, which is actually an Amazon best selling book called extend sex with ICU the 30 second trick. I'm gonna let Dr. Runnells kind of explain to you what that mean. When I look at it, I was thinking icu, intensive care unit.

Well, it's intensive if your marriage is on the rocks, that's for sure.

So can you tell us a little bit about what that is?

Yeah. So maybe a little background first that, you know, at heart, I started off as a research chemist and then trained in internal medicine. At heart, I still consider myself a medicine guy. But I think to do good sexual medicine, as you know, you have to understand medicine in general because it's very difficult to have good sex without having good health. And as you know, just to treat the genitalia without thinking about the rest of the body is not doing anyone any favors. And it gives not good results. So my interest in sexual medicine as a professional, not counting my personal, like everyone else, interest in relationships came from just seeing what a great need there was for someone to speak to men and women. Different reasons, though. Women were, I think, largely put off by their providers and research backs that up, that they, if they have the courage to ask the question about their sexuality, the doctor changes the subject after the first question 80% of the time. And only 14% of women ever even have the conversation, even though 40% of them are having problems. So it's becoming better, but they are blocked. And I think a reason for that is that. Excuse me. Until recently, as you know, we didn't have many options for women. We had 30 something FDA approved drugs and devices for men and none for women. And even now, the drugs we have, we still don't have an FDA approved version of testosterone for women. So the two prescription drugs we have are both psych drugs. Right. So I had being an internist, I had this background and started looking for a solution and going deep dive into the research. Deep dive starting two decades ago, which led to me doing hormone replacement for Women back in 2000. I was doing pellets before Suzanne Somers wrote that first book and was focusing mainly on women because that's who usually shows up in an internist office, some men. But back 20 years ago, if you remember, people were buying their Viagra off online a lot and doctors went to jail for that. And now after Covid, it's legal to buy your Viagra online. It's really sad that physicians went to jail for doing telemedicine two decades ago and now it's a thing. But anyway, so men would just get their stuff online, but women would come see me when they figured out they had someone who was actually would listen and try to diagnose their problem. But back to the book. The thing that happened was after doing the things you know how to do and making the 40 year old woman who's lost her libido feel good again, her sexuality is back. She loses the £40 she's on the testosterone, the menopausal symptoms are gone. She feels good about her body, everything's working. So here's the problem. Now the women come in three flavors and you know the flavors after they're. Well, flavor number one, she loves her husband and he's healthy and his sexuality works great. After she's well, your job is done. They go live happily ever after. Flavor number two, during that time when the woman had the loss of libido and felt bad about herself and was tired and depressed, the husband was abusing her and had three girlfriends on the side and treated her like dirt. Now when she gets well and loses her weight and her sexuality comes back, she's out the door and there's nothing you can do about it. She's gone. She's leaving that man. And so once again, your job as a physician is done. The third flavor bothered me a lot. And this is why I hesitate to even call it a book. But it was something Originally published in 2004 just in a three ring binder. And it wound up being the best selling sex book on Amazon for a while. But I wrote it for flavor number three and flavor number three is the woman. I should probably call it category number three because that's probably too.

You have a very good way of describing things.

Flavor may be too provocative. I never tasted these women, but you know what I'm saying. Maybe there's a fourth category. But the third category really disturbed me. This is the woman who gets well, she loses her weight. And this gets back to the question about the book. She loses her weight now, she has good libido, she feels good about herself and she loves her husband dearly. But there's a problem. When she had no libido and he had no libido, there was no mismatch. But now that she's got her energy back and her sex drive back and he can't keep up, she's very distressed because she doesn't want another man. She wants him, she loves him, but now he can't keep up with her. Sex drive. And especially 20 years ago, you couldn't get him to come see you because 20 years ago guys thought only bodybuilders took hormones and it was somehow a strike against their masculinity if they had to take testosterone or something. And there's a, there's a threat of that even now. So you couldn't get them to come see you. And usually the problems men have fell into either assuming that they were in love, and this is again category number three. And I would have, occasionally I'd have a woman ask me just to take her off the hormones. She loved her husband so dearly, she'd rather not have a sex drive than be wanting some attention that he couldn't take care of. So it really bothered me. But usually the categories were on the men, the reason they couldn't keep up. It was either erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation. And assuming the relationship was good and that there was a connection there, you know, these were soulmates. If I could fix that, then I would be done and they could go live happily ever after. And actually I think the premature ejaculation is the easiest to fix. And it's one of those things where I think I got a solution better than what's in the literature. And it's partly out of my personal experience, partly out of reading everything in the literature and thinking about it for two decades. And this book that's on Amazon is just a piece of the answer. Actually, that book is going to turn into a chapter in a 10 chapter book that I've been working on for two years. That's coming, pun intended, but that'll be probably too another six months to a year from now. But this book is the simplest, quickest way I know to help most young men.

And when you say young men, how old? What age range?

Young enough to where ED is not a problem. Because premature ejaculation, again, I'm going to tell you my opinion. And some of this is backed up by research and some of it isn't yet speculation, but it's speculation based on counseling thousands of people. And based on the research, it's not speculation about astronomy, it's based on the science. So if a man loses his erection or has premature ejaculation in a young man, I think it's often because the prostate is just so full. It's like trying to not urinate because your prostate is just brimming full. And so A young man, 15, 16, is going to have wet dreams because the prostate just fills up and it Spills out in the middle of the night with a wet dream, where if a 70 year old or 62 year old like me, my prostate isn't filling as quickly. And so the Chinese talked years ago in the dao about men having a cycle based on their chronological age or their actual youthfulness of their body. And the cycle is if you're ejaculating too much, you become weak and impotent, where if you don't ejaculate as much and you transmute that energy, you become more thoughtful, more creative, and you actually have sex more. But to do that, you have to be able to have sex without ejaculating. And that idea has only been around for about 2,000 years. And if you actually read the research that refutes that. I think the studies are all designed wrong. But anybody who's played football or been in a fight or given a talk knows that if you. As a man, I think it's different with women, but as a man, you're not as bright right after you ejaculate and you're more bright if it's been a long time since you ejaculated. Hence most football coaches will tell their players to stay away from their girlfriends the night before a game. And I won't get into the research. But the research is designed wrong, I think, because it's. That's a different subject anyway. So back to the thing in an older guy who say, maybe lost sensation from diabetes or something or just atherosclerosis, and he's not as attuned to the sensation. I think in that case, oftentimes premature ejaculation happens just because the man can't tell what's going on. It's part of the reason I'm a teetotaler is that I. If I'm cold sober, it's like a light switch. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying that I'm actually the opposite of bragging. If I have one drink, I cannot tell that edge as much. And I can't last as long as I want to last if I've had one drink of alcohol. So. But I don't.

What do you think about the definition of premature ejaculation? I think it's lasting like, what is it, two minutes intravaginal? Less than two minutes.

Yeah, I think it's total bull. I realize that people have to measure something when they do research. You have to measure something. And when you read the studies, it's so frustrating because you'll see, oh, they did a 20% increase in their time till ejaculation. But they went from something like 20% would be, or even they doubled it and they're going three minutes and they went to six. And as you know, many women depending on the day, but oftentimes, I mean, oftentimes. Again, I want to make this right up front. I am not proposing that every sexual encounter becomes some mechanical thing that goes on for hours. That's really a mindless thing that maybe some people think that women want because they watch too much porn. And it could be that a particular woman may want that when the stars are right and she's on vacation. But there's a variation. Just like with meals, sometimes you want a snack, sometimes you want a six course meal. And so I'm not proposing that that be the desired thing every time there's a sexual encounter. On the other hand, if your limit is, let's say, three minutes, and I can boost you from three and up 50%, and now you can go five minutes, four and a half, five minutes. In my opinion, for most women, that will be a snack on some days. And so you'll be good on snack days. But on the days when she wants a full course buffet with six courses, you're out. You're going to leave her frustrated. And I'm not making this up because again, I have talked to thousands of women and not counting the too many lovers, I'm just going to stay on the professional side. And on the professional side, what I have seen is that women will come to my office and sob and tell me that they're women, plural. This is pretty common. They'll say they're afraid to talk with their husband because they love him, they don't want to hurt his feelings, but that they don't even really see the use in starting the encounter because they know they're going to feel frustrated. And that's a learned behavior. It didn't happen the first time, or maybe the first 50 times they had sex, but it's a learned behavior. My best metaphor is if every time you crank the car up, the engine died before you got around the block. You would give up on driving to the store with that particular car. You'd go find another car that would get you all the way to the store. And so they quit even wanting to crank the engine. And now the relationship strained. And here's this man they used to dearly love, or want to dearly love, the father of their children. And they feel frustrated and they start taking a closer look at the Guy cutting the grass or delivering the UPS boxes and it turns into a problem. So that's too long of an answer. I know, but I think the definition of premature ejaculation, not for research purposes perhaps, although it could be done, but for individual people, which is what, that's what we do is we take care of individual people. We do research. But most it's, can you provide sexual intercourse for as long as your spouse and you desire on any particular day? And that might be 30 seconds on Monday and it might be three hours on Saturday. Now one of the things that's important, the other thing that's important about ED and premature ejaculation, and this will be one of the chapters in the book, I want this to be just reference packed, is that aerobic capacity counts, VO2 max counts. And sexual intercourse, not talking circus sex, just regular sexual intercourse, uses about the same amount of oxygen consumption as walking, not running, but walking upstairs.

How long? Like how many flights upstairs?

Well, that's just it. If you want to know how long a man is good for in bed, take him on before you take him to bed. Go to some tourist attraction where you have to walk upstairs and watch how long he can walk up the stairs before he becomes out of breath. And that's how long he's going to last in bed.

Oh, my God, women, I hope you listen to this. And men too. So if he can only walk up two flights of stairs, well, time.

If he starts to get exhausted or out of breath after five minutes, you got a five minute guy on your hands. And doesn't mean he can't take a break and eat a pretzel and go back at it after a break. But if you want more than five minutes, you need somebody to walk, walk, not run upstairs for whatever time you want to be in bed. And you know, I used to live in Birmingham. That's where I went to school and worked as a research chemist. And I lived at the foot of the statue that's there. It's a statue of some Greek God, Vulcan, that's what they call it. But picture a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty or something. So I would run up the hill and run up those stairs because I knew that statistic even as a college kid. And I thought, okay, I'm good to go, right?

Let me ask a personal question. How many stairs can you run up without getting tired then?

I don't know. I really don't know. Yeah, I just, I, I'm not this way now. I mean, I'm not, I Used to do marathons and triathlons, but I've never stopped. You know, I'm gonna start, like, brain. I can go a while. Okay. Walking. That will leave it at that.

That doesn't surprise me.

But. But it's, you know, my first book that I put out. Women would tell me, oh, when my husband read that, he started walking and he lost weight and he's healthier, and sure enough, our sex life is better. But that's a statistic that most people don't know. And so one cause of premature ejaculation is just the blood gets shunted away from the penis. If your muscles are going anaerobic because the vasculature is going to shunt it to whatever's active. And if your thigh and your abdomen are becoming anaerobic because your VO2 max or your anaerobic threshold and your VO2 max are not athletic, well, you're going to give out. You'll either have ED or you'll have premature ejaculation. So there's a lot more to it than that. This book is one chapter of the coming book. But the reason I started with it, it's the easiest thing I'm not going to. I don't mind revealing the secret of it if you wanted to know more. Obviously you can get more details about implementation in the book, but not that much more. It's a pretty simple idea. And this one I haven't read, and I've seen hints of it in the literature, mostly in the surgical literature. But this one I actually discovered in high school. I have one little story about how I figured this out. So I actually finished high school as a virgin. And I always worked a lot. I always had at least three jobs in high school, plus school. And I'm not saying this one was a virgin, but I stayed busy. But the summer between high school and college, I had a sweet girl. Then we figured out the birds and bees. And the first time I had sex, I kid you not.

How old were you then?

I don't know, 17, 18, whatever. Whatever it is when you finish high school, it lasted maybe a minute. And I said, this is too good to just last a minute. So being one of my nicknames in high school was Professor. So, I mean, I admit it, I just read a lot. And so I went and read everything I could find on sex, everywhere I could find it. And I don't know if I wish I could remember if I read this or if I just figured it out, because I've gone back now that I'm grown. And I cannot find this written anywhere, which is why I started with this tip in this book. Can't find it anywhere. Nowhere. None of the research, but I'm telling you, it's the simplest little thing. So what I found is that if my bladder, there's a crossover in the innervation. And if my bladder were completely empty, if I completely emptied it, I could last longer. And I mean when I mean completely. I mean, you know, you empty your bladder and then you shiver and a few more drops come out that empty. And now if you have long sex, your bladder is going to fill up again. You have to do it again. But it goes, you know, especially if you've been drinking lots of fluids, alcohol or not. But if you're 30 minutes, hour in, you're going to need to go empty it again. But.

Well, they both share the sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, so.

Exactly.

Point and shoot. Right? So parasympathetic is for erection.

Yes.

And sympathetic is for ejaculation. The bladder parasympathetic relaxes the bladder. So you got to have a relaxed bladder while we have an erection. You're absolutely right. If you have some urine in there, you're going to stimulate some contraction.

And the opposite is if your bladder is full and you know, speaking metaphorically, not your bladder, but if a man's bladder is full, it's more difficult to control ejaculation. Much more difficult. Now here's the other part that I noticed is that. And this will be coming, I hint about it in this book, the current book. So that's the 32nd trick, is you empty your bladder completely. And sometimes, especially if you're extremely aroused and you start to have sex five seconds later, if you feel like, ooh, I'm about to ejaculate, it might be two drops, empty it again. And now you've got some of the things like, okay, that's going to leave my lover frustrated. So that's some of the things I get into in the book, some of the mechanics of it. But it might take two or three times of that and then something happens. And this is the other thing that I've not seen in the literature. Nowhere. You ready for this? That same thing, and I know everybody's experienced this, you're in the car, I call it the safe zone. You're in the car and you think if you don't get to the bathroom in the next five minutes, you're going to just make a puddle. But there's no place to stop the traffic you're calling traffic you can't stop. And five minutes goes by, 30 minutes go by and then something switches and the urge goes down. Have you experienced that? But then you get out of the car when you finally get to the bathroom, and. And now it's this urge incontinence where you can't. Once you see the door of the. I think it's called keyhole incontinence or something. But once you see the door now, you can't hardly keep from having a urination. Right?

Been there.

Everybody has, right? Anybody that's driven across a long way, here's the thing that I've never seen written, that same thing applies to ejaculation. And so although it may be frustrating for a man who's prone to premature ejaculation, if he can go through that and other tips that I offer in the book and coming books and reach to a certain point, even though he's been having sex longer, it's usually I found somewhere around the 10 minute mark. So that's past what they consider to be premature ejaculation in the research. So you're into extended sex, but for sure past the usual five minutes, probably more like 10 to 15 minutes in. And I don't mean continuous, you know, mechanical stuff, but you're mostly penis and vagina sex. And you're 10 or 15 minutes in. It's a dance, right? And the dance is made up based on your lover's response. You're listening to her, you're watching her. And sometimes the dance is the tango and sometimes it's slow dancing, but it's a different. There's an art to it. And so as you're responding to your lover, I don't mean some mechanical jackhammer thing that's going on for 15 minutes, but mostly genital contact. It just like it does the same thing, it switches off and for some reason you can reach the safe zone to where now, okay. And you'll feel it. The urge goes away. Boom. You can accelerate the pace for a while and then it comes in a wave and then it'll come back. So I don't think most people know that's even there. Maybe they've experienced and just. Doctors haven't written about it. I don't know about you, but when I look around the room at the meetings where doctors meet to talk about sex, I get the feeling many of them are not having good sex.

Huh. You possibly could be right. Yeah.

Like I'll give you an example. I went to a Meeting once where one of the people on the podium, it was a meeting of gynecologists. And one of the people on the podium, a man made the statement that if you're talking about even postmenopausal women, because it was a meeting about women who are maturing, he says, if you're doing things right, a woman should not need lubrication. Now, this is a meeting of people specializing in sex. And I heard a rumble, somewhat of a rumble, because it was a mostly woman gynecologist crowd. And I wanted to raise my hand and say, well, maybe that's true if you're only lasting two minutes in bed. But what I would say is when you're 30 minutes in and the bed's covered in sweat and cum and urine and tears, give the girl a little ky so she can keep going. You know, that's kind of what I'm thinking. So when I look around and even when I read the literature and people are bragging about going from two minutes to three minutes, I'm thinking, okay, it looks good in numbers. But I think you're doing too much math and not enough sex, because that doesn't really count for much.

Oh, my God. Oh, you know, but, you know, most we know that it takes women at least 15 to 20 minutes to even get around, to even get going. You know, it takes, it takes 15 to 20 minutes for women. So, yeah, no, I, I, I can't believe somebody even make that type of statement. So I hope you did raise your hand and say, and say something. But some people were too polite to say anything.

Well, some people, you never argue with a closed mind. And I thought anybody that would make that statement from the podium just, I can't even have a conversation with that person.

Yeah, but it's, it's something to laugh about. But I'm glad you, you, you did mention something important about the book. And in fact, I actually summarize those points in my aftercare when I take care of men for premature ejaculation. I summarize those points from your book, actually, for homework for them to do, you know, empty the bladder. Empty the bladder and, you know, take their time, you know, be relaxed and, and you know, if they feel like they're about to ejaculate, go to the bathroom again, you know, and then come back and resume. Just simple things like that. And not be so tight down in their pelvic muscle. But I love what you say about the, what, you know, their capacity correlate with how, how, how long they can Go up the stairs. That, that is very, very revealing. And I, I'm gonna actually write that down in the show note. So I will put the link to your book in the show note. And it is a bestseller and it is a quick read, about 35 pages. So you can sit in the bathroom and read it and it'll be done. So it's a good reference and especially for about, about premature ejaculation and anything else you would like our listener to go before we end this session. Dr. Ronald.

Just two things. One is that the book, if you have Kindle Unlimited, is free. And, and I'm not trying to get a badge, but I don't take any money from the books I get. I mean, you know, I have a couple of non profits plus we do research with our group and it's only.

99 cents anyway, so if you buy.

It, it's, it's a buck. Yeah. And there's a paperback version, but I recommend if you have a Kindle, just get the Kindle version. So it's private. And if you have Kindle Unlimited, just get the free version. But the other thing that. So that's mechanics about the book. The other thing I would mention is that I know you feel this way because you have many talents and you said your practice has evolved, but I think it's worth mentioning why I think it's evolved. Plainly you have lots of talents other than sexual medicine. But I hear this from many of the people in our group, the Cellular Med Association. I know it from having been an ER physician is there's nothing more important than relationships. And I never want to talk about sex without bringing up the fact that yeah, it's fun, sex is fun, but our happiness machine, as Ray Bradbury said in one of my favorite books, Dandelion Wine, the family is our happiness machine. And Emerson said, sex or beauty is the scaffolding of love. Even people in their 80s, my parents are in the 80s. They've been married 63 years. What seems sex looks like can evolve. But sex in the broadest terms is part of what holds our most important relationships together. So although it's fun, I never wanted to have any discussion about sex without bringing people back to the idea that it's important enough to think about, talk to your doctor about. And that's why I think that your practice has evolved. Because even though we've both kept people out of the grave, even that somehow brings. I know it's rewarding, but it's a different kind of reward. And I don't think anything's brought me as much soul satisfaction as putting marriages.

And families back together and that is so true. I find that helping my patient who has not had relation with their wife in 10 years, 17 years and for the first time be able to be intimate with their wife and seeing their eyes light up and their face light up and they come in, they hold hands and they hug each other and they're like teenagers again it just brings a joy to my heart and I just know that I'm just in the right place doing that and if it weren't for you I wouldn't be able to do that. I would still be doing knees and spines and, and hips. I still do that now but I, I, I also do the sexual medicine as well. So on that note I like to end this episode and I thank you Dr. Reynolds for being with me on this episode and we'll see you in the next episode.

Thank you. Here.