Before 1905, there were no ‘hormones’ | Hacker News Reader

Before 1905, there were no ‘hormones’

theverge.com

54 pointsTomte23 comments

The headline strangely doesn't match the article, in no place does it say they are "overhyped" outside the headline. The last question revolves around pseudoscience and scams...but I'd hardly call that "overhyped." If anything I think hormonal effects in the past few years have been underhyped, especially in the topics of behavior between men and women.

Can I ask you to be more specific on the underhyped part?

I too believe it’s underhyped. Especially for men.

andropause ie “Male menopause” is rarely discussed but it’s affects on behavior/mood/energy/overall health are profound.

I agree 100%, but I still think there is a lot that we don't know about hormones.

Testosterone replacement therapy has some great benefits, but there are 8+ other known androgens floating around that science doesn't understand very well.

Like if you have sex drive problems, very recent studies are showing that DHT may be more important than Testosterone.

It seems like testosterone is the important one, but a % of your testosterone is converted into DHT that's why. Some people have low conversion rates.

Similarly, there is both free and bound testosterone. Free testosterone seems to have a much larger impact on muscle growth. But you can have high testosterone and low muscle growth if you have a lot of SHBG in your blood stream clinging to your testosterone and preventing it from binding with the androgen receptors.

> From a scientific perspective, we’re still looking into this. Do I think this will get people off murder? Probably not. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to say, “His hormones made him do it.” But from a scientific perspective, it’s fascinating to look at how hormones shape our behavior.

At best there's a small amount of this sentiment, but the title really doesn't match.

OK, we've gone with the sub-heading for the title here.

> The word and concept of “hormone” only date back to 1905. Before that, what did we believe was regulating our bodies?

This question seems to give too much importance to naming a thing, in terms of how much it means we understand that thing. It's not like before hormones were discovered we knew nothing about biochemistry. And even a hundred years later, there's still so much we don't understand.

The headline is weird. I mean, that was an interesting read why not just title it "A brief history of hormones" or something? You can use this headline (maybe adapt the timeframe slightly) tfor like 1000 different things that went big recently. Public transport, digital screens, internet, climate change, breast cancer prevention...

The author of the piece generally doesn't get to write the headline, which can lead to conflicts like this at times.

That's the job of the editors AKA clickbait managers

"It was the ability to, for the very first time, measure hormones down to the billionth of a gram. That’s like if you took a gram of salt and threw it into the ocean, and it had a powerful impact."

That's about 10 orders of magnitude out. Not as bad as the vacuum energy calculation, but still quite a wide miss.

I also got stuck on that sentence for a minute. The idea of being able to throw a gram of salt in the ocean in Florida, wait a while for the salt to disperse, and then measure the difference in a water sample taken in New York sounded implausible.

Also, when you talk about sensitivity, don’t you need to talk about the amount per something? E.g a billionth of a gram per milliliter?

I really got an appreciate for hormones when I worked in DNA structure. Hormones play a critical role in regulating DNA through proteins called transcription factors. Often, when I see people digging through SNPs trying to explain problems I ask them how much they know about hormones and transcription factors- typically get a blank face in response.

Something important about hormones, that this article completely avoids, is how the pharmaceutical industry abuses the actual findings of science to sell products.

A British doctor, Katharina Dalton, noticed that her monthly miseries went away when she got pregnant. She coined the term "Premenstrual Syndrome" ("PMS") for women's problems that go away as soon as their period starts. She further found that her patients' experience of PMS went away with the injection of Progesterone USP, which is the hormone that gets most amplified during a pregnancy.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ODI4QwtEGIYC

https://books.google.com/books?id=lpRsAAAAMAAJ

https://books.google.com/books?id=yII3AQAAIAAJ

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0091856086

A later scientist figured out how to use Progesterone USP without injections. Industry sells micronized (finely-ground) Progestone USP pills, but these don't work very well on account of the first-pass metabolism.

In the mid-century, while Dr. Dalton was doing her science, Industry was teaching doctors to prescribe the synthetic estrogen DES to prevent miscarriages. Now we know that DES causes cancers in the children of the treated. Whoops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol

Today countless women are given prescriptions to "regulate" their hormone cycles, or to protect them from getting knocked up. These prescriptions -- marketed as "birth control" -- use hormone-analogues that aren't actually perfect replacements for the natural hormones.

The steroid cycle only works with the right inputs -- cholesterol, thyroid, Vitamin A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidoge...

The tragedy of the situation is that the practical implementation of the science of hormones has gone exactly nowhere since Dr. Katharina Dalton's initial research in the 1950's. The modern standard of care specifically condones modern doctors' replacing a foundational step in their patients' steroid cycle (Progesterone USP) with an imposter (Medroxyprogesterone Acetate, etc). Some women do fine with this substitution. Some women never recover.

The anti-science of prescription fake-hormone marketing is an ongoing travesty and tragedy.

> Some women never recover.

Can you explain the supposed implications?

Fake-progesterone tricks the body into reducing its own production of Progesterone USP. Medroxyprogesterone Acetate (Provera, typically injected as Depo-Provera for 3-months of chemical sterility for otherwise-healthy young women) is a very effective fake-progesterone with a black-box warning of causing insufficient cortisol production (a symptom that is now associated with psychosis). The most common side effect of this defective drug is that it causes women to rapidly gain weight. Search on YouTube for "depo provera" for some anti-testimonials. My friend was turned into a mental health patient with three Depo-Provera injections, but the mental health professionals have never cared about cause-and-effect.

It's possible to recover from fake hormones with time and physiologically-appropriate interventions. To implement this in our medical system would require the medical profession to acknowledge its mistakes and prescribe the right type of Progesterone USP (which promotes its own synthesis, and is therefore a sort of 'antidote' for fake-hormone poisoning).

Illnesses are 'iatrogenic' when they are caused by medical treatments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

It's the same with TRT, exogenous testosterone stops your body from producing it's own testosterone.

It is however, a very low percentage (probably sub-1%) from what I've read that do not recover. However, some take longer to recover than others and can take 6mo-1yr to re-obtain natural levels again.

HCG prevents or reduces atrophy in male testicles while on TRT (analog to LH signaling hormone which controls testicles) and many of the most respected endos perscribe it with TRT now. Perhaps a similar solution should be added to birth control to continue the natural production of progesterone?

> Perhaps a similar solution should be added to birth control to continue the natural production of progesterone?

There are very effective ways for couples to deal with the fertility problem (edit: that don't involve chemical castration with patented medicines containing xeno-hormones). They are not profitable for the Medical-Industrial complex, so these strategies have been ignored by the high priests of medicine for the last 60+ years.

Strategies for women, strategies for men, strategies for couples... A different friend got panicked by a missed period, dealt with it in her own way, then went to Planned Parenthood for a free blood test. They said, "you had a miscarriage, let us deal with it next time." Hrmph.

Here is an example, which is how most sex hormones work:

1. Your adult body produces enough testosterone to have 400-1200ng/dl testosterone in your blood stream.

2. You inject 100-150mg of testosterone ethanate into your muscles weekly.

3. Initially, that 100-150mg of exogenous testosterone puts your testosterone levels at around 1000-1800ng/dl.

4. Your pituitary detects this, and decreases the amount of luteinizing hormone released. This is a signaling hormone responsible for regulating the production of the testicles, among a few other things.

5. Your naturally testosterone production stops, dropping you to 400-1200ng/dl again. But now all exogenous. (this happened because your body detected you didn't need to make anymore)

6. Over time, since your testicles are not being used the cells atrophy and are catabolized.

7. You quit TRT, and are down to 0ng/dl

8. Over a few weeks of no testosterone, your body attempts to increase production but must regrow cells in the testicles.

9. Often this takes around 2 months to get up to a normal range again. You might get to 300-700ng/dl in those months, aka lower than before.

10. Over several more months nearly all men will recover full testosterone production and be back to normal.

Some men however, in a rare case will not begin secreting LH again (secondary hypo) or will not be able to regrow the cells in their testicles to produce enough t again (primary hypo).

The same feedback loops occur in progesterins, estrogens and other androgens. I believe the thyroid hormones T3 and T4 also have similar feedback loops.

Many men on TRT says their balls shrink to grape sized lumps. What does it mean if they don't shrink?

There's a lot of errors in this: for example, in step 4, the hypothalamus actually detects the rising estrogen levels in the blood stream and signals the pituitary which in turn signals the testes to stop testosterone production. (Testosterone gets converted to estrogen)

If you read Dorothy Sayers 'Unpleasantness at the Belladonna club', you'll find that people were even back then obsessed with what they called 'glands'

No wonder sick gains appeared only in the second half of the last century.

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