Our guest this week is Dr. Stefan Buntrock , Consultant Urologist with post graduate qualifications in Sexual Medicine and Sports Medicine. He has a busy private practice in Göttingen, Germany specialising in men’s health conditions alongside standard urology care. He also owns and generates amazing content for the ever-popular Youtube channel – www.youtube.com/@UroChannel1A which covers everything from Peyronnies to CPPS in a bite size, easy to understand format for patient education. I thoroughly recommend it to all those working in this field. Stefan talks us through his experience in Men’s Health, and how adopting ESWT transformed the way he deals with CPPS and ED, in particular. He has also recently added to his significant professional repertoire by providing education for therapists / clinicians through the excellent online portal – https://shockwavetherapist.com/shockwave-therapy-formens-health-conditions Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/TheAbbeyfields Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/theabbeyfieldsclinic Follow us on Instagram: Instagram.com/theabbeyfieldsclinic Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk93PyEIoG_IH3kyKR9kmGQ Episode Transcription James (00:02): Welcome to the Ed Clinics podcast. My name is James Woledge. I’ll be your host for this series where we’ll be discussing everything to do with shockwave therapy and men’s health conditions. That’s everything from erectile dysfunction through to chronic pelvic pain syndrome, Peyronie’s disease, hard flacid syndrome amongst others. We’ll be talking to a host of experts from around the world to shed some light on these complex conditions. And we’ll also be talking to patients that have been through treatment journeys themselves, so you can get a greater understanding of how we can help a broad range of people with these conditions. So without further ado, enjoy this episode. Thanks for coming over. The last, I think probably couple of months before Thomas got hold of me, I was like, this guy’s everywhere. You had nearly like 250,000 on your YouTube channel, which I now tell patients about because I am not just saying this because you’re on my podcast, but they are, they’re like perfect little bite-sized bits that we tell patients about nitric oxide. That one that you did the eight sort of tactics for that, Stefan (01:04): That’s really James (01:04): Just exactly what patients are after. Yeah, I think that’s really good. And then I sort of digging around, usually I get patients to, sorry, I’ve been in clinical day guests to talk about themselves, but I can’t help but talk about him like Right, doctor? Doctor. Oh yeah, now I understand. So he’s got PhD, Scandinavian languages consultant, urologist, surgeon, sexologists, which we don’t have for those in the UK listening, we have urologists specialise in sexual medicine or andrologist. And then you have sports medicine qualifications as well. So two PhDs, sports med speak, several languages, a YouTube sensation that makes you pretty unique. Right. Stefan (01:47): Next month I’m going up for the exam for nutritional medicine. I’m kind of nervous. James (01:56): Yeah, that’s impressive. Yeah, right. I don’t even want to go into the machinations of your mind, but clearly you are not one for sitting around and just resting at peace. Stefan (02:04): No, I mean I’m just a regular guy, so if you’re interested in stuff and you look around and you easily get interest in this and that and suddenly a few decades later you have accumulated a lot of stuff. James (02:21): Yeah, it’s making me feel pretty bad because I might be a bit older than you. I’m 50 and you’ve managed to produce all of those things by the, how old are you? Do you mind me asking? Stefan (02:30): I’m so sorry. I’m 57. James (02:32): Oh, you’re looking pretty good. I’ll give you that. Stefan (02:34): Thanks. James (02:35): So you currently have private practise in the middle of Germany? Stefan (02:39): Yes. James (02:40): Alright, and is that just you or do you work with a team of others or that’s your thing? Stefan (02:44): No, it’s just me. I made the experience that I’m quite good at doing things on myself, so I get lots of things done and the best thing about working alone is that you can make all your decisions yourself and you take credit for all the good things that you decided, but you also take the beating for all the bad things that came out of it. I don’t have to discuss any topics with anybody concerning my YouTube channel, so I just come up with a topic and then I just do it. James (03:19): And I think I heard on another podcast that I listened to you on that you’ve done 110 videos just pretty much around the penis or men’s health, Stefan (03:30): Something like that. It’s around the penis. James (03:33): Wow. Stefan (03:33): And when I started, I never thought one could do so many videos, so many different videos about the penis. But it turns out it’s a pretty interesting organ and there are lots of nuances that you can explore in the penis. And I was most fascinated, I think about the fibro skeleton of the penis. Many species, they have a bone inside and we don’t. So the penis in principle feels soft, but it isn’t because it’s some of the miracles of nature. So when the penis feels with blood, it suddenly becomes rigid because of this fibro skeleton that expands (04:17): Because (04:18): Of the pressure inside the penis. And I think this is just fabulous structure. If you look at it with all these pillars and connected to the odour surface, it’s very fascinating. James (04:29): It makes some of the words that are used around the penis somewhat difficult because as you will probably get, you still have patients thinking there’s a bone in there because of course there is still a diagnosis of a fractured penis. And so when people hear fractured penis, they think, well, there must be a bone in there to fracture. And you go, well actually no, it’s a fibro skeleton. That actually is the fracture in effect, the collagenous stuff that does it not a bone. Yeah, it’s definitely got some interesting anatomy as I’ve discovered over the last five or six years looking into this now, I mean you spend all of your life doing men’s health. I mean for us in the UK I’m part of a group of clinics called ed clinics.co uk. So we are a physiotherapist osteopaths. There are some medics involved in that as well. And it probably makes up only maybe 10, 15% of our working day. The rest is still for me, musculoskeletal, which is how I got into shockwave over 10 years ago. And your journey’s been slightly longer than that, about 15 years ago maybe, that you started Stefan (05:30): Seeing something like that? So I started out as a regular urologist, you go to med school and then in my time we had something which was called A IP, which is asked in practicum. So after I was done with med school, I had one year and a half that I was kind of a doctor for German standards, but I wasn’t fully licenced. They abandoned that. But back in the day they had it where I looked around in all kinds of specialties. So I was in gynaecology and cardiology, internal medicine. I think I also did some geriatrics stuff. And then I ended up in urology. And as every urologist I had a surgical training and it’s basically cancer. When you work in a hospital, most of the stuff that you see is about cancer. So I always regarded myself being an oncologist in a way, but relatively early in my career I thought, well, what we’re doing is maybe not the best of things because we’re leaving aside the sexual aspects. (06:39): And as you mentioned, I’ve also studied literature and if you look around and look at the world, sex is one of the main promoters of actions for people. So whenever there’s anything you can be pretty sure sex is involved. And if you read novels, it’s everywhere in the novels. So I was actually, when I was getting out of med school, I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to become a doctor. So I was interested in becoming a consultant and I had a job interview at the Boston Consulting Group that was over 20 years ago. Then they were asking us, so the first branch was they opened in Boston and then they opened in Tokyo and they were asking us, so why do you think it was Tokyo? So everybody was speculating about the economy and it being so important. I was so stupid I didn’t speak up because I immediately thought, well, because there was some kind of woman in Tokyo that was the solution. (07:47): So he had a girlfriend in Tokyo, so he opened a new branch in Tokyo. So there’s sexual motives everywhere and this is what I thought was so important. So we rip out the prostates and for that matter also the bladders. And then we say, here you go, you will live for many decades, but we don’t care about your sex life because it’s your private life and farewell, this is how we do it and this is how we still do it today. And because of that, I got interested in sexual medicine and I started to do all this stuff with PD five inhibitors. But then I came to a point where I thought, well, it can’t be everything. So I was interested in becoming a sexologist and this is the psychologic part of things. So I learned sex therapy at the cite University hospital in Berlin. That was a course that went over many years, I think two years. And then I studied because you had to handle all these cases. It wasn’t just going into a course, you had to make your homework and have patients, see patients get supervised, do therapies, get supervision on the therapies was quite complicated and how it all started, James (09:03): Right? I mean, that’s a hell of a journey. You can’t say that you lack commitment in this journey. I mean goes without saying. This podcast is principally set up. It was orig
