It's a total racket.
Be warned: Going on TRT should be considered a one-way street. Once you start adding exogenous testosterone to your system, your body's natural production will decrease. It doesn't take long for your body's natural production to virtual stop completely, making you dependent on TRT for the rest of your life.
There are hypothetically ways to try to counter this shutdown, but it's far from guaranteed. Many people who start and then stop TRT end up with lower levels than when they started, even with the countermeasures in place.
No man should experiment with testosterone unless they're ready to continue using it for the rest of their life. I know plenty of people who thought they were getting a leg up in their 30s by getting on TRT, who now regret having to constantly buy and maintain TRT supplies and carry it around whenever they travel. The initial euphoric effects of TRT will wane over time, too.
I was pretty adamant about giving it a shot, and consulted with an endocrinologist who said the same thing ("it's not low enough to introduce what would become a life sentence of treatment"). After much stubborn research trying to find a legitimate second opinion[1], I finally conceded that he was right.
I'm all for biohacking, but the one-way/ratcheting nature of T therapy specifically should make it an endeavor of last resort.
[1] I say legitimate because you can effortlessly find someone who will agree that you and everyone needs a T boost, and will write you an Rx on the spot if you have the cash. An it will work. It's not that it's a scam, or particularly deadly. The benefits are just very overplayed compared to their permanence, which is downplayed.
The testosterone hype is out of control.
The scariest part is that many people are skipping straight to TRT instead of trying to identify underlying causes of low testosterone. For most people, simple lifestyle and diet changes can make a dramatic difference.
Many people also overestimate the benefits of increased testosterone. This is doubly challenging because sudden testosterone increases can feel quite good for a short while, but the effects will subside as your body acclimates to the higher levels. When the initial effects wear off, many patients start asking for higher doses or looking to steroid cycles to augment the testosterone.
It's also important to note that testosterone isn't an isolated hormone system within your body. TRT will alter a number of related hormones with various effects that aren't well-studied. Exogenous testosterone can't match your body's natural cycles, either. A person might actually feel better with a natural testosterone level of 400-500 (actually totally normal and quite common) than a TRT-driven level of 600-700 due to these effects.
Yep. This was an admission I had to make to myself: it's a bit ridiculous to gripe about low T while 50lbs overweight, working a sedentary desk job, and subsisting mostly on beer and snacks. There's a strong argument to be made that my T wouldn't be so low if I had my shit together.
TRT aside, young people need to get their vitamin D, get exercise, eat little to no refined sugar, filter their water, and be allowed to co-mingle; when males and females are separated for long periods of time, testosterone decreases even more.
I don’t think that’s true. Even birthcontrol requires a prescription.
I know this because I live somewhere where this is the case.
Because in men you can't.
Also you'll likely end up infertile.
It's not as simple as "experimenting" with TRT. Exogenous testosterone will begin diminishing your natural testosterone production immediately. In theory there are ways to counteract this, but in practice it's not guaranteed that someone can ever discontinue TRT once they've started. Even those who rebound may not return to their original, pre-TRT levels.
Testosterone is also interconnected with other hormone systems, which will also be disrupted by TRT. For many, TRT turns into a game of adjusting various medications up or down to try to get back to how they felt pre-TRT.
No, absolutely not.
The size of your testicles is in no way indicative of your testosterone production.
While a shorter period of use generally has a higher chance of your natural production restarting after ceasing exogenous testosterone, your natural production of testosterone shuts down immediately with the introduction of exogenous testosterone.
Testicle shrinkage is unarguable a side effect of exogenous supplementation. How is that not a good marker for your production shutdown? If there’s a good explanation, you’re not being very clear about it at all.
https://www.mayocliniclabs.com/test-catalog/Clinical+and+Int...
what kind of filtering?
Just adjusting one's hormone profile to hit some level you have in mind is not as easy as you imply.
My estrogen levels were too low for a while and this caused me all kinds of side effects. My endocrinologist simply increased my dose. Then we noticed that my testosterone levels were too low, so we reduced the dose and got rid of the testosterone blockers.
After a while we noticed that my levels fluctuated too much during the day. So we switched from pills to injections (which create curves that last a week instead of 24 hours).
This solved my brain fog problems, made it easier for me to fall asleep at night, brought me back to the energy levels I had in my early twenties, etc.
It made me realize how dependent we are on stable hormone levels. I think many people would benefit from hormone therapy or at least annual lab checks.
Tanking your estrogen levels, or having them too high, suuuuuuucks. And the surprise to me was having estrogen come in too low from taking too much aromatase inhibitors. The mood, skin, and libido changes are awful.
Out of curiosity, what does it feel like?
* Really dry skin
* Night sweats like you would not believe
* Urinating a lot
* Depression and fatigue