I’ve had three cortisol tests over the past year. the first was a cosyntropin stimulation test which seemed to prove that my adrenal function was working fine. The second test was a 24 urine panel which showed my cortisol level in the lower third. Then the third test most recently was part of my rhine labs comprehensive 24 hour urine panel; these results showed my cortisol in the upper third of the range. I have no idea if my adrenal function is normal or not from these results.
What I have observed over the past six months is that my mid to lower back (where the kidneys are) get a weird vibrating like feeling especially at night or on occassion when I’m in a stressful situation. Afterward they are a little sore as well. I notice on a bad night sleep wise, I wake up and feel soreness back there. Does anyone else get this? I would assume that this is a stressed adrenal response?
I had a 24hr cortisol test a while back that showed above range first thing in the morning, then either low or barely in range, for noon and late afternoon. I was wondering if you guys think yohimbine hcl, taken at 11am and 5pm could bump my cortisol levels a little?
…or do you think it could do more damage to my adrenals? …or not do anything?
I was on yohimbine hcl for a while with no sides, but, my doc suggested I quit it.
yea ive heard yohimbine is great and everyone who has used it on here and seen some benefits from it. I believe it will stress out your adrenals, but your cortisol levels dont seem that bad as you described them.
Yeah, maybe the cortisol levels aren’t that bad… but, I have about 80% of the hypothyroid symptoms, yet two thyroid tests in the past 6 months came back normal. Due to see the urologist again in a few months and have to think of how to get this addressed.
Hypothyroid symptoms can be due to too low thyroid hormones or too low cortisol. Note that:
Too low thyroid means: either too low FT4 or too high RT3 in a blood test
Too low cortisol means: too low free cortisol in at least one point of a 4x saliva test
Your case seems to be the latter. Of course, knowing your thyroid blood tests would be nice.
Note also that, if your metabolism was very high before propecia, normal thyroid panel is misleading. For example, I had high cortisol (all points were high on a 4x saliva test) and mid/low range thyroid hormones. After starting boosting the cortisol production line and the thyroid hormones, I feel better. Obviously, to do that, I had to find a dr that does not only think in terms of “ranges”.
Here is the answer to theoretical questions on the thread:
No, you might not, because JN is not the only case. correiovip recovered using prednisone. Why don’t you try to explain his recovery without involving cortisol? If you read through this thread, you’ll see other examples of people who recovered by addressing cortisol or thyroid issues, on top of more “traditional” hormone therapies (TRT, clomid, etc…). That thread also contains possible explanations about why this happens. While you can see all these explanations as theoretical smoke, everybody has to acknowledge that the examples are real.
And how many among them also SUCCESSFULLY addressed thyroid and adrenal issues, AT THE SAME TIME of addressing testosterone? In this thread, I challenge everybody to answer this question by providing a counterexample supported by blood tests and saliva tests. Nobody provided anything yet.
It may not cure you, but if it can improve your quality of life, as it did in my case, why not try it?
Yep. There are a few cases of people who never took a 5ARI and for whom TRT doesn’t work. Since some people like us exist, why do we have to come up with hard explanations? A simpler one could be “Propecia made us become like them.”.
That’s because you don’t believe in the theoretical part of this thread. Fair enough. But you must acknowledge that correiovip improved by “messing” with his cortisol (via prednisone). His example formally PROVES that you can improve sexual function by “acting” on adrenal hormones.
Correiovip’s was certainly a significant recovery and he had PFS but it was perhaps different from the norm. He said that he had periods, even sexually, where he felt normal and that is not the case for most guys who crash where libido is 0%. He said his sometimes varied from 0- 30 %. Still , he is at least more convincing than other examples like ithappens (lol).
Lots of guys have tried HC, even under the supervision of Crisler in some cases, and it has not helped much if at all. And anyway, it doesn’t matter how f’kd up your thyroids are if you’re injecting huge amounts of test you should be feeling something. JN’s case proves this, he did build muscle and feel less anxious/depressed before he knew about adrenal fatigue and treating thyroid. It could be there is something going on whereby those who crashed are in a worse position, androgens coming back and the body shutting down response, although that is just speculation on my part and there are odd cases of guys who get worse after quitting and get a bit better.
And anyway, fog and fatigue are symptoms of androgen deprivation, not as you say, 99% down to low cortisol.
Absolutely, my cortisol levels are the worst on the board so treating it may help in some areas. But I’m being realistic.
Given that there are scores of us exhibiting the same patterns and problems on account of the same drug, it would be more productive for investigating this phenemenon on it’s own.
One case does not prove anything in the context of many other cases where symptoms haven’t been resolved, or even mitigated much, despite trying to fix hormones.
Technically, it’s not true. According to chilln, high metabolism allows higher level of all hormones in the cells of your body. Although you (and many others) may not believe chilln, this is partly confirmed by awor, who provided a link in JN’s thread about how T3 increases the gene expression of androgen receptors. So, since high T3 makes you more sensitive to androgen, it logically follows that low T3 makes you behave as if you were insensitive to androgens. Therefore, if your thyroid hormones are low, your T levels will have less effects.
I appreciate your honest wording (“this is just a speculation”). Read my story: I crashed one week after stopping. Nevertheless, I somehow responded to clomid and I’ve had cycles of “almost normal” and “very bad” functions, just like correiovip. I don’t think that “crashing” makes much of a difference.
If that’s the case, then why do most people improve mentally and physically, but not sexually? Why do some people (bostonusa2009, myself) get all their brain functions and most of their energy back through HC or thyroid medication, but not the sexual function? If that was the case, we would improve by the same amount in all areas, but that’s not the case. For most of us, we dramatically improve (naturally or by medication) in mental sides and physical sides (not T-related sides), but only marginally in the sexual sides.
I’m very realistic too. Although some people can literally recover through cortisol and thyroid medications, most people won’t. Of all our members, only correiovip recovered by addressing ONLY cortisol. And, as you correctly point out, he was in “better shape” than most.
In the other examples (Dury and JN above all), addressing sex hormones was the kicker in their recovery. But, unlike most (me included) who addressed sex hormones, they addressed also thyroid and adrenals. This is, I think, particularly evident for JN. In his case, TRT never really worked by itself, but only once he fixed cortisol and thyroid hormones. His story shows also how hard it is and how long it takes to fix these hormones.
In conclusion, what I’m trying to argue is that bringing up cortisol and thyroid hormones will make you more sensitive to T. At that point, TRT will have more chances of working and you will have a much greater chance of recovery. In my opinion, statistics point to this direction. But we would need more recoveries to support this.
I agree that our case deserves scientific attention.
You are right. But with the examples of Dury and JN, the count gets up to 3. Since the total number of recoveries is not very large, I think we should not disregard a subset of 3 recoveries.
Isn’t Dury the guy who said fin made his dick bigger, then told his dad (in his 50s, took fin and ‘looked like Johnny Depp’) he had sides who, rather than say ‘stop the drug’, sent him synthoid tablets? Perhaps I am too sceptical but I was never that convinced by him.
Anyway, I appreciate much of what you say even if I don’t agree with it. We are all trying to get better after all.
That paper talks about adrenal hyperplasia, which happens when your adrenal glands lack the enzymes to make cortisol and other glucocorticoids.
People with such physical issues at the adrenal glands will have high ACTH but low cortisol, because the brain would be telling the adrenal glands to produce more cortisol, but they wouldn’t listen. I don’t think that any of us here has high ACTH and low cortisol (or other glucorticoid). I’m not sure, though, so let me know if I’m wrong.
I think that our problem (at least mine) is a lower-than-optimal ACTH. Recently, for example, one morning I had low ACTH and low cortisol. The problem seems to be at the hypotalamus. In most cases, according to chilln, this problem is due to aging. In our case, on the other hand, it is caused by a stable hormonal loop with low cortisol, low thyroid, low T metabolism. To get out of that loop, according to chilln, you successively increase 1) cortisol, 2) T4, and 3) (only if needed) T
Oscar, can I kindly ask you why you posted this, without posting how Dr Crisler dismissed it as “complete and utter nonsense”?
In particular, this guy has never had any symptoms of corticosteroid excess. So, too much HC cannot be the reason for this health issues. There other arguments to tear down this guy’s doctors’ idea, but I don’t want to waste my time re-writing them, when everybody can read the whole thread from the link you provided.
I understand that you want to warn about potential danger of taking HC or pregnenolone. But what you posted is from a guy who believed his doctors because he had not idea where his problems came from. He posted it on the forum, and Dr Crisler said that they don’t come from HC. You don’t believe Crisler? Fine. But you must agree that if HC or pregnenolone gave those horrendous problems even only to 0.1% of the users, there would be two forums pregnenolonehelp.com with terrible stories written by users who lost their hip! These websites don’t exist, and therefore we can assume that HC and pregnenolone do not cause these problems.
I can feel your anger towards this thread. But could you channel it in a more constructive way, instead of posting distorted lies? For example, why don’t you provide an explanation to correiovip’s improvements that does not involve cortisol? Or why JN’s TRT worked only after he addressed thyroid and adrenal issues?
If you cared to read the threadstarters follow up posts and Dr Crisler’s posts you would have realised how worthless that thread is; even he backtracks.
We have another example of recovery through achieved via thyroid medication: fuckfin recovered through Synthroid. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4270
If I’m not wrong, this brings the recoveries via Synthroid to 2 out of 2 members who tried it.
I would be curious to see other people’s view about his recovery. In particular, how other theories explain it.
I don’t know much… but I read that Synthroid is synthetic T4. So, my guess is that it is good if your T4 is low. According to chilln, T4 also helps the conversion pregnenolone -> progesterone -> cortisol, if that is a problem.
In the big picture, T4 (synthroid) will speed up your metabolism without needing much help on the cortisol-production line. But its very long half life (1 week) makes it hard to dose. Therefore, people prefer using T3 for a while, because its half-life is 7h, and then switch to T4 when they individuate the right dose. As far as I understand and as far as my personal experience goes, T3 does NOT help the conversion pregnenolone -> progesterone -> cortisol; therefore, it needs to be carefully balanced by supplementing HC, pregnenolone, or progesterone.
According to this theory, speeding up the metabolism is a necessary step for recovery.
If you accomplish this step successfully and you are lucky, you will recover (fuckfin, correiovip).
If you accomplish this step successfully and you are NOT lucky, you will recover by using TRT or clomid (Dury, JN).
If you do NOT accomplish this step, you will NOT recover even by using TRT or clomid (all the others that unsuccessfully tried TRT or clomid).
