The Vertica is a scam (in my opinion)

[VerticaScam]

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Disclaimer:
I am not sufficiently qualified to understand any form of medicine, including the Vertica. My uneducated opinion and experience is my own, and it should not sway your decision. You must do your own research and form your own opinion. I am making this post under the influence of multiple biases, and despite making my best effort to tell the whole truth, you should not trust what I say. I can provide supporting evidence for many of my statements in this post, but you should still not trust what I say.

TL;DR:
The Vertica website boasts how effective it is, according to the “clinical evidence”, but that “clinical evidence” is only one study on the Vertica, funded by themselves, which cannot be found on their website. The study is of intentionally poor design, and proves absolutely nothing. Their staff who you correspond with are salesmen; not medical professionals (despite giving medical advice); who will do anything to secure a sale and convince you that you are the problem, and not their Vertica. The company then attempts (and fails) to shut down criticism of their scam, and responds to your questions by insulting you for having ED.

Buying the Vertica:
I am in my 50s and I have suffered from ED to some degree for about 20 years, and in the last 10 years I have been on treatments for it. I first heard about Vertica from a marketing email sent to me from Menschem (an online pharmacy I used to buy tadalafil from). I did some reading on the Vertica, and there are not many people who talk about first-hand experience with it on the internet. Their website says that 96% of people in a clinical trial were hard enough for penetration after three months of use. The website also states the Vertica has no side-effects. Very promising!

On their website I was given the opportunity to speak to someone at Vertica to see if it was a suitable treatment for me. I gave the number a call and spoke to a man by the name of “John-Paul Moule”. I spoke with him for around an hour, and he went into great detail about how the Vertica works, and what I can expect from treatment. He reassured me that almost all men experience some benefit from using the Vertica, and that those who don’t are usually men with no erectile function at all (meaning not even injections work for them). Given that John-Paul Moule has so much first-hand experience with the patients using Vertica, and given how much he cites the “clinical evidence” and mechanisms of the Vertica, I figured I was talking to either someone medically trained, or someone involved in the design of the Vertica. It all seemed very promising to me, and I was all too happy to get my credit card out and make the purchase. £1275 to get my sex-life back with no drugs needed! A bargain, really.

Using Vertica:
The Vertica arrived a few days later. The build quality of the device itself isn’t too bad. The user manual has many spelling and grammatical mistakes in it that should have been picked up by a spellchecker. The manual states possible side effects, including pain and blisters, which contradict the “pain free and side-effect free” claim on their website. An online copy of the manual can be found here: https://vertica-labs.com/wp-content/upl ... ual-en.pdf

I got to using it, and it was as I expected: heat at my penis and perineum, and occasionally some pain. One time I did get a small blister on my penis, which went after a few days. It is a little fiddly to use the perineal pad, but I figured it out.

6 weeks in, and my ED had not changed at all. I corresponded with John-Paul Moule and discussed my lack of results. He advised me to change some settings on the Vertica, and adopt a different placement of the Vertica pad and use more gel. He insisted that the Vertica is definitely effective, and that I am probably just not using it optimally, as he said is often the case with new users. He said I should stick with the Vertica, as many patients experience results after three months, in line with the “clinical evidence” (and coincidentally after my returns period expires). I could have pushed for a partial refund here, but what does £1275 matter to me when the cure to my ED is around the corner? Even if I did get a refund, it would only be for a fraction of what I paid, as they keep £350 for a “restocking fee”. Either way, I trusted what I had heard, and I believed that results would soon follow.

Investigating Vertica:
After 3 months of use, my returns period had expired, and I was still without results. I did a little research. First up was their “clinical evidence”. I checked their website from top to bottom multiple times over, and there was no way to find out what this “clinical evidence” even was. I had to Google “Vertica evidence” to find the study on a third party site. This study was funded by Vertica themselves, and shockingly had NO PLACEBO. Alarm bells started ringing here. A placebo group is easy and standard practice to include in a study, so it is unusual that this study did not include one. Strangely, an exclusion criteria in the study was people with ED considered to be worse than “moderate”. In other words, the study only included people with relatively mild ED, who are also the most susceptible to the placebo effect. By the study’s design, it is no surprise that 96% of participants were able to achieve penetration by the end of the study when you consider that their baseline IIEF-EF scores suggest they were able to achieve penetration to begin with!

I compared this to placebo-controlled studies for other ED treatments.

This study reports that patients given placebo tablets had an IIEF-EF score increase of 35%
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/P ... ext=IIEF,9

In this study, 36.8% of participants who knew they had been given a placebo reported significant IIEF improvements
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1975828 ... 20erection

Besides the psychogenic factors, a large contributor to the success of placebo is “regression to the mean”.

As the study on the Vertica only included participants who had mild-to-moderate ED, who knew with certainty that they had not been given a placebo, and as the results are not significantly dissimilar to sugar pills, it is clear to me that the Vertica has no evidence demonstrating its efficacy. Despite that, the artificially inflated “results” from the study are plastered all over the Vertica website, touted as irrefutable facts. The only explanation for the study’s poor design is that it was intended to be used for marketing, as the study itself doesn’t demonstrate that the Vertica does anything to treat ED.

The website claims that the Vertica works by strengthening penile collagen. There is no evidence for this.

There is an upcoming placebo-controlled study on the Vertica which is required for FDA approval and subsequent sale in the US. However, having spoken to some participants of this study, many people in the placebo group can tell that they have a placebo device as it produces no heat. In fact there are some people who have posted about their experience in the study on Reddit, confirming this to be the case. What good is a placebo-controlled study when the participants know if they do or do not have a placebo?

I looked into the company behind Vertica: an Israeli company by the name of Ohh-med. There isn’t much to say about Ohh-med itself. It makes one product; just the Vertica.

Looking into their employees, it is apparent that John-Paul Moule is a salesman at Vertica. His LinkedIn page corroborates this ( https://uk.linkedin.com/in/john-paul-moule-165970ba ). This man had assumed the role of a de facto medical prescriber and medical practitioner, when he is in fact a salesman whose only job when dealing with patients is to ensure a sale and convince you that the Vertica does work, and if it doesn’t work then you’re probably just using it wrong. How can this man recommend a product he is not qualified to recommend, for a medical condition he is not qualified to understand, suffered by patients he is not qualified to treat? I suppose ethics and medical standards do not matter as much as fleecing people of their cash.

My Trustpilot review:
It was clear by now that I had been intentionally mislead if not outright scammed. I detailed my experience in a brief review on Trustpilot. This review was swiftly reported as not being genuine by Vertica, and was subsequently removed. After correspondence with Trustpilot, I had proven that I was a customer of Vertica, and the review was back on the site.

They then reported my review for defamation, and the review was taken down. After sending more documentation to Trustpilot, the review went back up.

Then they reported my review for containing “harmful or illegal content”. Review taken down. More documentation sent. Review back up.

As of writing this, the review is still up:
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/vertica-labs.com

Despite reviews on their Trustpilot page being 2 months apart on average, there were 3 new reviews posted within 4 days of my review. It has been nearly a month since these reviews, and there has suspiciously been no more reviews. My tin-foil-hat-theory is that these reviews were swiftly made by Vertica staff to push my review down. One review written by “Eve Oney” is directed at me, and written similarly to the abusive messages I would receive. But this is conjecture; I have only a hunch (and no proof) that these reviews were written by Vertica, so please don’t take my word for it.

I asked the Vertica staff these questions, which I have still not had answers to:
-Why do you keep reporting my Trustpilot review?
-Why isn’t the study referenced on your website?
-Why doesn’t your website make clear that the results in the study are largely if not entirely a result of placebo?
-Why didn’t the study include a placebo?
-How can you claim the Vertica works when it has not been shown to be more effective than placebo?
-What qualifies John-Paul Moule to give medical advice?
-Why does the website and advertisements list the Vertica as being painless and without side effects, despite the user manual listing several side effects, one of which is pain?

Instead of simply answering my questions, they sent me abusive messages. I was told that I am nothing more than an idiot internet troll who is sad and angry because of my ED, and that I don’t understand what the Vertica even is. It is disheartening that Vertica resorts to insulting their customers when silencing them does not work. I didn’t expect my experience with Vertica would culminate in being insulted for the very condition I was told they could treat.

Amongst the insults, I was told by their staff that the Vertica would not be MHRA and CE certified if it was not effective. I reached out to the MHRA who told me that they have not assessed the efficacy of the Vertica, and that their certification only confirms that Vertica devices can be traced and are safe to use. CE certifications are similarly merely indicative of the Vertica’s safety and not efficacy.

I continued to push for answers to my questions, but never got any answers.

Conclusion and going forwards:
There is now a reference to their study on the international Vertica website, but there is still not one on their UK website.

Vertica have since removed their reply to my Trustpilot review, which I assume is because it is not good PR for them to insult their customers.

Ultimately the Vertica did nothing but waste my money and a lot of my time. In retrospect I should have been more suspicious of the Vertica before buying one. Tadalafil works sort of okay for me, and I’ve got alprostadil on hand for when it doesn’t. I am not mad that I spent so much money on something that doesn’t work; I am just disappointed in myself for falling for a scam.

I have a friend who I met on a sexual dysfunction subreddit who I’ve kept in contact with over the years. He’s quite desperate to try everything before going for an implant. I am going to send him my Vertica at no cost. I have cleaned the Vertica as best as possible, and leaving it a few weeks should kill off any possible STDs I may have without knowing. I am now in correspondence with the Advertising Standards Agency to see if I can take legal action against Vertica.

In conclusion, I can safely say that I regret having any dealings with the Vertica company. If anyone has any questions about my experience, I am happy to answer them (and I promise I won’t insult your sexual inadequacies, unlike the staff at Vertica!)

[Old Guy]

Nice write-up. From all the reviews, stories and comments about any Shock Wave therapy, most anything stated about it appears to be unsubstantiated hogwash. Many clinics offering a cure but tell you it takes a couple months of treatment. Greedy doctors making tons of cash off poor guys suffering from ED. And the worst part is many of the guys have no improvement.

[VerticaScam]

Nice write-up. From all the reviews, stories and comments about any Shock Wave therapy, most anything stated about it appears to be unsubstantiated hogwash. Many clinics offering a cure but tell you it takes a couple months of treatment. Greedy doctors making tons of cash off poor guys suffering from ED. And the worst part is many of the guys have no improvement.

The Vertica is RF, not shockwave. RF has been studied even less than shockwave

[Old Guy]

Nice write-up. From all the reviews, stories and comments about any Shock Wave therapy, most anything stated about it appears to be unsubstantiated hogwash. Many clinics offering a cure but tell you it takes a couple months of treatment. Greedy doctors making tons of cash off poor guys suffering from ED. And the worst part is many of the guys have no improvement.

The Vertica is RF, not shockwave. RF has been studied even less than shockwave

OH, OK. Did not know there was a difference between the two. But I still believe any of those "cures" are a scam.

[GoodWood]

I’m sorry you had this terrible experience.

I have long felt that if shockwave therapy worked this forum would be full of happy users (like the implant forum is). It would be full of guys sharing their happy news and discussing which clinic/doctor was their favorite.

Instead there occasional posts from guys HOPING it works and talking about trying it out.

It truely seems that the only ones who benefit from Shockwave therapy are the people that sell them.

[CanGetItUpButNotOff]

Excellent well-balanced assessment. Thank you.

I was a participant in the USA trial. Mine did emit some kind of energy because some settings and some positions were definitely painful. I can't say for sure if it was the real RF or a fake pain.

The trial has some validity, in my mind, because it is being conducted in four (at least initially) very respected institutions. However, it is really dragging on, presumably because they are having a hard time recruiting volunteers. My six month use period was 1H25. As a side-note, I was promised a device at the end of my trial but because it was not yet FDA-approved, they have not delivered - I'm skeptical I will ever see it since I am now 10 months past. On the other side of the coin, for my personal experience, I thought the trial protocol was very poorly designed. I logged each experience but I didn't think it gave an accurate portrayal of it's efficacy.

I echo the comments that this has nothing to do with shockwave. LiESWT is controversial enough that it confuses the argument to lump this device in that category.