For those of you who know me, I’ve been on this forum for close to four years. My forth anniversary of having contracted PFS is coming up this January (already bought the champagne).
In all honesty, I haven’t been able to recover to date for more than the odd day here and there, for unknown reasons. For a while I benefitted from a probiotic but it lost effectiveness. Nothing else really worked. I’ve hence decided to try embarking on some low-dose TRT regime. In the past my free-T has been really quite low for my age (close to the lower limit). In fact an afternoon blood test (not ideal, I know) showed my free T below range. Part of the reason for the low free T is the high level of SHBG I have in my blood. Upon doing research I haven’t been able to find a way this can be lowered aside from boosting levels of Testosterone.
This forum is filled with stories of experiments, with far more failures than successes. There have however been treatments that have yielded varying levels of success. Most involved some kind of hormonal intervention. After all, this is likely a disorder of the body’s hormonal system of some kind, be it receptor-based epigenetic alterations or otherwise.
From my four years and countless hours spent on this forum, hormone replacement seems to have been the treatment which was the most likely to yield positive results. This is despite many guys not benefitting from such treatments despite their T levels being incredibly high. Because I have very low free T there is at least some metric, some anomaly I can seem to be able to target.
I don’t really see much of an alternative at this stage. Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, research efforts seem to be at a dead end. Even if research was started today, it would likely take years before results are in, and the likelihood that the extra facet of knowledge garnered would lead to meaningful understanding, let alone illuminate an effective treatment regime is very slim indeed.
I certainly don’t wish to speak for others, nor encourage those who would wish to wait for new research to gain a better understanding of our shared condition to seek out treatments which have the potential to cost plenty of money and run the chance of making themselves worse to varying degrees. Perhaps such an approach would be the smarter one to take. Perhaps patience will pay off in the long run. Perhaps. Inciting others to try hormone therapy is not the purpose of this post - I just want to make that abundantly clear.
What I am hoping to do is to speak to any other Australians who have had doctors who were at least willing to entertain the possibility of providing them with TRT treatment. I had a meeting several years back with a well-renowned Melbourne-based endocrinologist who says he cannot do anything for me as my free T level was not below range.
Has anybody in Australia, Melbourne or otherwise had a doctor who was open minded in this respect?
Much appreciated.