Topic
Testosterone
Everything we've written on Testosterone — 6 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
6 articles
Hormonal and endocrineThe midlife man no one talks about — the andropause analogYou know what menopause is. Everyone does — not well enough, the cultural literacy there is still far below what it should be, but the word exists, the concept has a name, and when a woman describes the experience her doctor will at minimum recognize it as a hormonal transition worth investigating. The male equivalent — the gradual multi-system hormonal shift that happens in a man's late 40s and 50s — does not have that. You don't get a word that means anything to most people. You get "midlife crisis," which is a cultural joke. You get "aging," which closes the conversation. You get told it's normal, which is technically true and practically useless, because normal in the sense of common is not the same as normal in the sense of healthy or inevitable or nothing-to-be-done.9 min readSexual healthErectile dysfunction that isn't just vascular — the desire and arousal complexityThe pill works. Mechanically, it works. You take it an hour before, the plumbing performs, the encounter happens. And yet something is off in a way that's hard to name and harder to bring up — with your partner, with your doctor, or even with yourself. The desire isn't quite there. The anticipation is muted. Arousal takes longer to build and feels less urgent when it arrives. The connection you used to feel, the charged quality of attraction, has been replaced by something that feels more like going through motions than genuine want. You look at your partner and the feeling isn't absent, but it's quieter. The morning erections that used to be reliable and almost annoying are now intermittent, sometimes absent. The PDE5 inhibitor handles the mechanics. It can't manufacture desire. It can't restore the arousal that's supposed to precede and create the conditions for physical response. You are, in an important sense, medicating around a problem without addressing it.9 min readSexual healthLow libido in women — beyond HSDD and what the workup should includeThe relationship is fine. There is no obvious stressor, no unresolved conflict, no moment you can point to where things changed. Your partner is the same person. Attraction hasn't disappeared. But desire — the spontaneous pull toward intimacy, the thing that used to arrive on its own and require no particular effort to access — has gone quiet. You can find arousal if you look for it, but it takes longer, needs more context, requires more deliberate intention than it ever used to. Sex that used to feel natural now feels like something you schedule mentally, a process rather than an impulse. You notice it most in the contrast: in what you remember desire feeling like, versus what it feels like now to locate something resembling it.9 min readHormonal and endocrinePeptides for andropause — the male midlife hormonal transitionYou don't feel bad, exactly. You just feel less. Less energy to push through the second half of the day. Less recovery after a hard workout — the kind that used to take a day and now takes three. The weight around your middle has been there long enough that you've stopped thinking of it as something recent. Sleep is technically happening but doesn't seem to be doing what sleep used to do. And something that you can't quite name — drive, urgency, the background hum of motivation — has turned down in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't noticed it themselves.10 min readSexual healthPeptides for men's sexual function — the integrated landscapeYou don't feel the change the way you feel hungry. It arrives more like a gradual dimming — a reliable process that becomes less reliable, an enthusiasm that takes longer to arrive, something that used to be automatic requiring effort. For some men it's a clean mechanical problem: the mechanics don't cooperate when they should. For others it's upstream — the desire itself feels muted, the drive that used to organize itself without any conscious decision simply isn't running the same way. And for a lot of men, it's some combination of both, playing off each other in a feedback loop that becomes its own problem on top of the original one.10 min readHormonal and endocrineThe isolation of testosterone — Adolf Butenandt and the 1935 NobelOn the first of June, 1889, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard stood before the Société de Biologie in Paris and described what he had done to himself. He was 72 years old, a neurologist of considerable distinction — he had been Jean-Martin Charcot's predecessor at the Salpêtrière, he had described the hemisensory syndrome that still bears his name — and he had spent the previous months injecting himself with a fluid he had prepared from the crushed testicles and testicular blood of dogs and guinea pigs. He reported that he felt thirty years younger. His intellectual energy had returned, his physical strength had improved, his digestion was better. He could run upstairs. He could work longer hours.10 min read