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For years I've been hearing that rhinos -- horribly endangered -- are being slaughtered because Asian medicine prescribes rhino horn as an aphrodisiac. I've heard that tigers are nearing extinction because tiger bone is used in Asia as an aphrodisiac. I've heard that abalone, sea horses and sea turtles are also threatened by the same enormous demand for aphrodisiacs. I've also heard that these things don't work, which of course helps keep the demand infinite.

Among European parallels is the ibex, which used to abound in mountains across Eurasia and North Africa. Apparently you could scarcely lift your eyes unto the hills without an ibex winking back at you. But the field of ibex medicine developed in the Middle Ages, and ibex were hunted out of existence in one place after another. Ibex fragments were used for ailments from sore throat and gout to poisoning and curses. And stones from their intestines -- "bezoar" stones -- were treasured as aphrodisiacs. (Luckily a few ibex in the Italian Alps survived the age of ibex medicine, and they have been reintroduced into other areas.)

So the advent of Viagra, the famous new erection-granting drug, made me wonder whether this would be a case of technology to the rescue. There was such a frenzy over Viagra in the United States -- if there were even a fraction of that going on in Asian countries, might not people around the globe be stopping with their guns to the very heads of tigers and rhinos, turning on their heels and rushing down to the pharmacy? Or at least to the phone to place an order to buy pharmaceutical stocks?

Of course, Viagra (sildenafil citrate) is not an aphrodisiac, but a treatment for impotence. It affects ability, not desire. But the term aphrodisiac is used so loosely that it often includes remedies for impotence. In addition, Viagra is intriguing to many men with no particular problem.

Viagra has been good news in surprising quarters. The undainty haste with which insurance companies agreed to cover Viagra led to legislation ordering them to pay for contraceptives used by women, which most plans didn't cover. Similarly, Japan's top medical advisory council had been shaking its collective head doubtfully over the birth control pill for decades, refusing to approve it on safety grounds. Now it has reversed its position, apparently because of the embarrassing contrast with the speedy embrace of Viagra.

I wondered whether the invention of Viagra was also good news for the rhinoceros and the tiger. However, it appeared that at least one of my premises was unsound. Rhino horn and tiger bone used as aphrodisiacs in Asian medicine? "A myth among Westerners," said World Wildlife Fund (WWF) staff botanist Chris Robbins, who works in the traffic department, which monitors international trade in endangered species. His colleague Judy Mills, director of WWF's traffic office in Hong Kong, agreed. "All this stuff about rhinos and tigers being used for aphrodisiacs -- it's a complete myth."

A myth?

Well, almost. It's true that rhino parts (horns in particular) and tiger parts have been used for thousands of years in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), also called Traditional Asian Medicine (TAM), but not for sexual purposes. TCM is an ancient and well-codified system of medicine, and in its pharmacopeia rhino and tiger parts are nowhere prescribed for sexual uses. A passage headed "Rhino Horn is Not an Aphrodisiac" on WWF's Web site makes this point, and adds, "The penis of the rhino still has limited use as an aphrodisiac in Laos, Thailand, and India, and genital tonic pills are still on the market in China, but the horn is generally used as a fever-reducing remedy." Not just any fever, but high, life-threatening fevers, the kind of fever that led one traditional medicine practitioner who is also a conservationist to tell Mills "he would take the last horn off the last rhino if his child were dying of fever."

While Hoffmann-La Roche researchers didn't find that rhino horn had any effect at all on the human body, some Hong Kong scientists working with rats reported that massive doses had some effect on fever.

Next page | Tiger bone is used to treat arthritis and rheumatism, among other things