> He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.

It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".

This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.

It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.

And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.

So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.