Astronaut Col. Steve Austin, the 1970's Six Million Dollar Man, was lucky by comparison, it seemed. He only needed to have his legs, an arm and an eye replaced by bionic parts. But Mohammed Abad needed a bionic penis.

It certainly was one of the more memorable headlines of 2015, and by now most people know the story of Mr. Abad who lost his penis and one testicle at age six when he was hit by an automobile. He's managed to stay in the news, after his long-touted appointment with a British sex worker to lose his virginity had to be postponed when he was in another car accident this January (no damage to the private parts this time, happily).

But closer attention to the procedure performed on the 43 year-old from Edinburgh shows it to be more banal than bionic.

What Mr. Abad has been touting is a penile implant, invented way back in 1973 – the same year The Six Million Dollar Man debuted, incidentally. A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (Trends in the Utilization of Penile Prostheses in the Treatment of Erectile Dysfunction in the United States) indicates that of the over 1.7 million men who had erectile dysfunction and who used Medicare between 2001 and 2010, 53,180 had penile implants.

Sometimes called a penile prosthesis, the implant is actually a rather simple mechanism. It consists of a reservoir and a pump, both cylindrical in shape. Both are implanted into the penis, where they are connected to another reservoir, of saline, which is embedded in the lower abdomen. The entire apparatus is controlled by a pump, which resides between the testicles, under the skin of the scrotal sac.

When the pump is activated, it delivers saline from the reservoir to the penis chambers, filling them and causing an erection. The prosthetic erection is typically shorter than what a man would experience normally, but more recently cylinder models have been crafted to address these “inadequacies.” A valve at the base of the pump channels the fluid back to the reservoir at the end of the intimate act.

It's certainly a wonder of modern science, but hardly Six Million Dollar Man material.

Considering how many ads we see and hear for erectile dysfunction aids, the business of penile implantation must be booming, right? Wrong, according to that same Journal of Sexual Medicine study. Despite the improvement of surgical techniques for inserting the prosthesis – it is more and more frequently being performed as an outpatient procedure – the effectiveness and popularity of viagra and   penile injections has trumped the “bionic” cure.