Dr Crisler -- brief insights on adrenal/hypothyroid issues possibly related to Fin useage

General Discussion
#1

[i]Some info from Dr. Crisler, from the old Yahoo Group. Note his responses are in CAPITAL letters to the gentleman who posted the initial message.

Posted Wed January 5, 2005[/i]

Steve–

Welcome to the group. I am a physician who has been following this group,
and welcome your insights.

I will insert some responses/questions into your post, IN CAPS.

Regards,

Dr. John Crisler, DO

-----Original Message-----

Hi Y’all.

I’m Steve Richfield, a part-time health researcher and present conductor
of the WS-Forum group here on Yahoo. My specialty is central (brain
controlled) metabolic control system issues, but I have a pretty good
understanding of most metabolic control system issues, regulation of
body temperature, etc.

Eric asked me to drop in here and see if I could figure out what is
happening with you folks. There are a number of reasons why it is easier
to fix a group than an individual with the same problem, generally by
applying epidemiological methods. THAT WILL BE VERY HELPFUL!

Unfortunately, I am coming in the middle of an ongoing process, so
please excuse my ignorance of what has been and is happening. I suggest
a multi-dimensional approach:

  1. We develop a group of theories as to what is happening and start
    refining and eliminating them as we can.
  2. We get everyone’s stories and test results into some sort of central
    place, so we can see what is consistent and what is not. WE ARE ALREADY IN THAT PROCESS.
  3. Rather than having everyone try the same things at the same times,
    you’ll pick and choose the experiments that YOU want to do, so that
    hopefully no more than one or two people will have to try the things
    that do NOT work. WE ARE NOT GOING TO START SHOTGUNNING POTENTIAL THERAPIES, BUT SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS ARE BEGINNING TO EMERGE.

As an expression of where I am presently coming from; from what I have
heard from Eric, you have all been poisoned by some noxious potion from
Merck, that probably emulates some steroid hormone(s). NO, IT IS A 5-ALPHA REDUCTASE INHIBITOR, PREVENTING THE CONVERSION OF TESTOSTERONE INTO DHT.Steroid hormone
poisoning is a complex issue, because the primary effect is to
desensitize you to the poison ARE YOU REFERRING TO RECEPTOR DOWNREGULATION?
and whatever it transforms into as your body processes it. Then, when you stop taking this stuff your bodyattempts to make more of these similar hormones to cover the shortfall now that it has been desensitized, exhausts its reserves of hormoneprecursors, you go into “steroid hormone shutdown”, I HAVE NOT HEARD THIS
PHRASE BEFORE and generally feel like crap as all sorts of things stop working right.

Hormones normally operate at VERY low concentrations, typically less
than one person in the population of the world! However, poisoning
screws up the sensitivity to such low concentrations. You can become
desensitized in hours, and require years to recover from it and regain
nearly normal sensitivity. Fortunately, your steroid hormone system is
mostly “closed loop”, meaning that when your sensitivity drops, that you
just make more of the stuff, that is if you are able to. THIS IS
CHARACTERICTIC OF RESISTANT STATES

We may have todevelop a long term plan to have you back to perfect health several years into the future.

One approach is to continue taking the noxious potion that caused the
problem in the first place, but gradually decrease your dosage over a
year or few. The BIG risk is that if you accidentally take a double
dose, e.g. you forgot that you already took your pill, then you can be
instantly back to square one (or worse).

Another approach is to take large doses of steroid hormone precursors
like pregnenolone, and for men,
DHEA. ABSOLUTELY NOT! DHEA CONVERTS INTO
ESTROGENS IN THE MALE BODY, NOT TESTOSTERONE. THESE GUYS MUST AVOID ELEVATING ESTROGEN LEVELS LIKE THE PLAGUE. Then, you’ll have the feedstock to make the large amount of hormones you need to feel OK in the wake of the poisoning.

Note that with our screwed up American diet that has way too little
animal fat and cholesterol I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT , that people normally run short of steroid hormone precursors about the time that they start running short of hair, typically in their 40s though this varies a lot. Add to this the problems attendant with steroid hormone poisoning, and you could be in pretty bad shape. THIS HAPPENS WHEN CHOL DROPS BELOW 140. I DO NOT THINK MANY MEN FALL INTO THIS GROUP. USUALLY IT HAPPENS WITH STATIN DRUG OVERUSE
(A COMMON PROBLEM).

BTW, interest in sex is a pretty good indicator of the condition of your
steroid hormone system. YOU BETCHA!

The main steroid/temperature interaction is in the production of
adrenaline. Your thyroid controls your long-term (many hours)
metabolism, adrenaline controls your medium-term (an hour) metabolism,
and peripheral circulation compensates for your short-term temperature
control needs. If you fall short or lose control of your adrenaline,
your 24-hour average temperature will probably be close to OK, and you
can avoid sudden changes because your peripheral circulation control is
still intact, but between these two your temperature will wander around
more than is normal. Then, in a failing attempt to correct these
wanderings, you will quickly deplete what little adrenaline you have,
and quickly get worse. This way, your mornings will tend to be better
than your afternoons. I THINK MANY OF THESE GENTLEMEN HAVE MORE TROUBLE GETTING GOING IN THE MORNING, INDICATIVE OF THYROID ISSUES. THE POSSIBILITY OF ADRENAL FATIGUE PLAYING A PART IS INTERESTING, THOUGH, AS I WOULD HAZARD A GUESS THAT LOWERED DHT WOULD INCREASE “STRESS RESPONSE”, AND LEAD TO
ADRENAL BURNOUT IN TIME.

Unfortunately, when you throw a monkey wrench into your metabolic
control system by taking an active hormone, your metabolic control
system can simply decide that you must be getting older and that some
things just don’t work right any more, like 98.6F. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS LAST STATEMENT

Once your metabolic control system has given up on 98.6F, YOU ARE REFERRING TO AN ALTERED “SETPOINT” just curing whatever screwed you up in the first place will NOT automatically get you running at 98.6F again. Instead, you must usually FORCE your temperature to 98.6F HOW? for an entire day or more, and then kick it up there every morning, sometimes for months, before your temperature will start cycling between a normal 97.4F sleeping and 98.6F waking temperature again. DO YOU HAVE ANY SOURCE OF REFERENCE MATERIALS DEALING WITH THIS CONCEPT I CAN STUDY?

There are other approaches to resetting temperature, like taking the
thyroid hormone T3 (trade name Cytomel). Some people get their doctors
to write a prescription for the smallest doses, 5 mcg Cytomel, and take
one or two of these each morning to kick their temperatures up until
their body “gets the idea” and does this without the pills.

If indeed you are running short on adrenaline from desensitization or
steroid hormone shutdown, then dressing a little UNcomfortably warm
suppresses your need for adrenaline to regulate your temperature, so
that even people with seriously damaged adrenal systems can function at
98.6F. I used this method when resetting my own temperature to
circumvent my exhausted adrenals.

Of course, there are doubtless unexpected twists to this tale from the
laboratories of Merck that we’ll just have to figure out as we go along.

There are hazards with all approaches. For example, if you load up on
steroid hormone precursors but don’t correct your low body temperature,
you then make a lot more than normal adrenaline to “sleep walk” at
97.something temperatures. THE COMMON THREAD OF POSSIBLE DE FACTO (I.E. WITH PERHAPS “NORMAL” RANGE THYROID HORMONES BUT ALL THE SYMPTOMS) HYPOTHYROIDISM STATUS POST FINASTERIDE USE HAS STRONGLY EMERGED THROUGH THIS FORUM. I WOULD
NOT HAVE NECESSARILY SUSPECTED IT WERE IT NOT FOR THEIR STORIES
This stresses other systems, most importantly your vagus nerve that suppresses your heart rate and digestion. Racing hearts and round, firm, pot bellies (often followed by hernias) are the most common indicators of high/exhausting vagus nerves. I fell into this particular trap and ended up with atrial fibrillation, which is how I got my education about these “little” details. Fortunately, it usually takes years for such disasters to fully develop, so a few hormone precursor pills to figure out just what is happening shouldn’t be any significant threat to your health.

I’ll hang around here and answers any/all questions that I can. Please
put “Steve” in the subject line to get my attention.

Does this generally sound like a direction that the rest of you are
interested in going? [b]I CERTAINLY AM OPEN TO ANY AND ALL POSSIBILITIES HERE.

AGAIN, WELCOME ABOARD![/b]
Steve Richfie1d

#2

Another post:

"Yes, how many members total are there here?

How many are suffering low body temperature SINCE starting fina, who were not so beforehand. This is kind of hard for people to judge.

Could someone begin to collect the numbers please?

I can fathom a mechanism where severely reduced DHT levels could increase conversion of T4 to rT3.

Also, I lost the link to all you gentleman’s stories (sorry) that were
compiled a while back. May I have that again, please?

Regards,

Dr. John Crisler, DO"

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#3

Followup post

RESPONSES INSERTED IN CAPS.

Regards,

Dr. John Crisler, DO

The information contained in this message is intended only for the personal
and confidential use of the recipient(s) named above, and is protected by
state and federal law. If the reader of this message is not the intended
recipient or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended
recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this document in
error and that any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this
message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in
error, please notify us immediately, and delete the original message. We
would certainly do the same for you.

-----Original Message-----

Eric,

As you will see, the side effects people have experienced are pretty
wide and varied, though many seem to be related to erectile
dysfuntion and libido problems.

Which basically tells me that that there is probably SOMETHING wrong
with the steroid hormone system. ABSOLUTELY. Of course, most of the
knowledge in
this area relates to deficiency and accidental poisoning situations, and
not long-term chronic poisoning. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THIS?

These, particular, side effects -are-
documented by Merck, but, are supposed to return to normal after
discontinuation.

Obviously they haven’t a clue or they wouldn’t have pushed this stuff
onto the market in the first place. MAYBE, MAYBE NOT. LOL. I wonder what
experiments they have
performed to establish that these return to normal on discontinuation?
Alternatively, maybe they do know of these problems but decided to keep
this knowledge locked up, in which case perhaps only a lawsuit could
knock it loose. IN MY EXPERIENCE, THE INCIDENCE OF NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS IS
MUCH HIGHER THAN PUBLISHED IN THE PI.

For many, the side effects experienced during and
after usage appear to be, at the very least, long term, and perhaps
permanent.

Note that drug companies are sensitive to ORGANIC damage - things that
can be seen with the eye (and scalpel) or through a microscope, but NOT
control issues where you feel like crap but nothing is overtly
destroyed. WELL, DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, LIBIDO CHANGES, APPETITE CHANGES,
SEDATION, ETC FALL INTO THAT GROUP It is REALLY hard to “prove” control
system problems, though
I suspect that we could devise objective tests to do just that.

As I indicated when we started our initial dialog on
the WS forum, my side primary effects, decreased ejaculate, low body
temps, major loss of body and head hair density (severe acne subsided
about one year after quitting) appear to be permanent now after
5 years of the drug.

Of course these are at the end of some long cause-and-effect chain that
we need to move to the head of. Is there a hyperlink somewhere on the
web for the “sheet” that comes with these prescriptions so I can study
how they say it works? With any luck, this should be a pointer to the
head of the cause-and-effect chain.

I also now believe, after some of our dialogs,
that I sufered from some level of adrenal exhaustion a couple years
after I quit. I DOUBT IT IS STRONGLY RELATED AFTER THAT LONG OF A PERIODThis is much better now, but, the low body temps remain
for me (as does the major changes is upper torso body hair and
a greatly reducded ejaculate level).

With care, you can almost literally “reset the temperature of a stone”.
Perhaps a first step would be to reset someone’s temperature here and
see what (if any) other problems remain. Of course, resetting
temperatures is what WS-Forum is all about. VERY INTERESTING! I WANT TO
LEARN ABOUT THIS. At least that would separate
the temperature issues (that certainly could underlie the majority of
the problems) from the OTHER (and probably earlier in the
cause-and-effect chain) problems.

Some people have also complained, of nervous system issues, e.g,
depression like symptoms, inability to deal with sress, mental fog
etc. From what we have already discussed, perhaps some of these
issues are related to adrenal/low body temp in addition to
low levels of male hormone(?) I THINK SO.

Certainly could be, as these are all VERY common symptoms of low temp.
Indeed, resetting low temps is rapidly moving into the mainstream as a
method of dealing with infertility. SO DOES ELEVATED TEMPERATURE.
SPERMATOGENESIS ONLY OCCURS WITHIN A NARROW TEMPERATURE RANGE.

I am sure that the stress of knowing that the drug may be causing
more serious and permanent side effects is contributing to many of
the complaints–so one one of the challenges will be to try and
focus on the primary problems if possible.

YES, work at the head of the cause-and-effect chain for a cure, rather
than at the tail end for a treatment. IN ABSENCE OF CONCRETE
PATHOPHYSIOLOGY, WE MAY NEED TO SATISFY OURSELVES WITH FINDING A SUCCESSFUL
THERAPY FIRST. THIS HAS HAPPENED MANY TIMES IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE.

One thoery put forth by Dr. Crisler, a contributor to this forum, is
that some, not all people, are suffering from HPTA suppression. I
say some, because, hormone lab results to not always bear this out,
i.e., some of the people here have male hormone levels well into
the mid-to-upper ranges which would, on the surface, rule out HPTA
suppression. Clearly, there is something more complicated going on
here (or something we are all missing that may be common to all). YES,
COMPLICATED IN THAT SOME MEN RECOVER THEIR HORMONE LEVELS, OTHERS DO NOT.
AND BOTH GROUPS MAY STILL SUFFER THE ILL SIDE EFFECTS OF THE FINASTERIDE
USE.
Lab results are almost worthless once you have been poisoned, because
the combination of desensitization and closed-loop control ups your own
output to try to make up for the lack of the poison. NOT TRUE! THE FACT THE
BODY IS ABLE TO ONCE AGAIN PRODUCE THE HORMONES IS A VERY IMPORTANT POINT.Then, the system
becomes exhausted, usually due to a lack of steroid hormone precursors
like pregnenolone, MERELY INCREASING THE ACTIVITY OF THE P450SCC ENZYME,
WITH HCG, WOULD SOLVE THAT PROBLEM, IF CHOL LEVELS ARE ADEQUATE and all
steroid hormone systems then suffer, and not
just the one that was poisoned.

I AM NOT SURE HOW YOU USE THE WORD "POISONED".

Another common thread, which I know will not surpise you, is almost
all of the Dr’s, endo’s and urologists that have been consulted do
not believe the reported side effects are due to this drug. NOT THIS ONE!
As I
mentioned, one of the leading male hormone specialists at UCLA
simple stated that people are blaming thier problems on this drug
and it’s all in thier heads. I THINK THAT IS ALL IN HIS HEAD.

All in the head argument: This is a metabolic control system issue,
which is controlled by your hypothalamus, which is in your head. Hence,
in a sense, they are probably right, but not the way they mean. LOL.

What is cause and what is effect? People take this drug for some reason,
which could indicate a common malfunction in substantially all of the
people taking this. It might be VERY interesting to work up some people
who appear to be ideal candidates for this stuff BEFORE they take
anything, to figure out what is REALLY wrong with them. YES. NO ONE ACTUALLY
HAS THEIR DHT LEVELS TESTED BEFORE BEING PUT ON PROPECIA. Maybe these
people are “on a track” that will lead them to your present problems in
a few years, and taking the drug is just a “signpost” along the way?!

There are LOTS of possibilities here and no way to sort them out
with lab tests alone. From long experience, I know that these issues can
only be resolved by performing some simple experiments to narrow things
down. High on my list are the following:

  1. Some people here can sometimes get to 98.6F. YOU HAVE TO APPRECIATE THAT
    98.6 IS ONLY AN AVERAGE. IT IS NOT A MAGIC NUMBER. IT IS AN AVERAGE ACROSS
    THE POPULATION. FOR SOME, A DEGREE BELOW, OR ABOVE, THAT IS PERFECTLY
    HEALTHY FOR THEM.     Can you STAY at 98.6F
    for hours at a time if you put on all of your winter clothing at the
    same time, so that you are a bit UNcomfortable? This experiment removes
    all load from your adrenal system, THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. so that the
    regulation machinery can
    be tested independently from your hormonal machinery.

  2. If you take large-dose pills of pregnenolone and DHEA, MALES SHOULD NEVER
    TAKE MORE THAN 50MG OF DHEA PER DAY. DOING SO ELEVATES ESTROGEN LEVELS,
    WHICH HAS SERIOULSY DELETERIOUS EFFECTS ON THEIR HEALTH    . do the
    symptoms substantially subside? This can sometimes be hazardous if done
    for years, but should be no hazard for a few weeks. ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE.
    This would support
    the theory that most of the problems come from precursor exhaustion,
    which is high on my present list of theories. I THINK IT IS MORE A MATTER OF
    HOW THE PRECURSORS MOVE ALONG THE PATHWAYS, RATHER THAN A DEFICIENCY OF THE
    ACTUAL PRECURSORS. IT IS ABOUT THE CONTROL SYSTEMS, NOT BUILDING BLOCKS,
    IMPO.
    Of course, once you cover your precursor shortfall, a hormone panel will
    show what systems have been affected because your levels of those
    hormones will then be astronomical. This would also be good evidence to
    use in court.

  3. Does coffee make you feel better or worse? If indeed your problems
    relate to hormone production, the “coffee test” should make you feel
    worse, and not give you the “kick” that healthy people receive from it. THIS
    IS AN INDICATOR OF ADRENAL FATIGUE, IN WHICH CAFFEINE INDUCES UNCOMFORTABLE
    HYPOGLYCEMIA.

  4. Note that this is the worst time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere)
    for body temperature related problems. However, if someone with severe
    and apparently low temp symptoms were to arrange to warm themselves up
    to ~98.6F for a day, e.g. sit in a hot tub with a thermometer, lounge
    around a sauna, go visit South America, etc., if their symptoms
    disappeared then we could probably rule out other unrelated phenomena
    causing low temp symptoms like brain fog and depression. AGAIN, 98.6 IS NOT
    A MAGIC NUMBER.

  5. As you know from WS-Forum, I REALLY need long hot “shower tests” to
    tell what is happening with temperature regulation. “Central” (brain
    controlled) problems like central hypothermia make you feel like crap at
    98.6F and you can’t push your temperature above 98.something, whereas
    with organic problems you feel GREAT at 98.6F and you can push your
    temperature up to 100.something.

  6. Is it true that people generally got worse by DIScontinuing the
    drugs? It would be interesting if someone took, say, half doses for a
    few days to see if they felt better on them. This is an experiment and
    NOT a suggested treatment. With hormone poisoning it is the PEAK
    hormone level that causes the problems, so that an accidental double
    dosing (e.g. by forgetting that you already took your pill) can cause
    more problems than months of normal dosing. Hence, BE CAREFUL regarding
    peak dosing during any experiments. If taking this stuff helps, then we
    can presume that the continuing cause-and-effect chain still has the
    same head, which is important to know when designing an intervention to
    cure this problem.

As you can tell from the above, this effort isn’t going to go anywhere
without people trying some experiments to see just what is happening. OF
NOTE: I AM NOT CONDONING ANY EXPERIMENTS.Lab tests only measure instantaneous levels THAT DEPENDS UPON THE
COMPARATIVE ACUTE PHASE REACTIVITY OF EACH. and not the “flows” where
hormones may be being made and destroyed in large volumes, and
conventional “book research” is only useful in solving conventional
problems, which I presume that Merck’s research has already eliminated.

No, don’t everyone run out and purchase megadose bottles of
pregnenolone. If you do that, then I won’t have anyone to perform future
tests on BEFORE their precursor shortfalls are addressed, e.g. to see
what priorities their metabolic control systems may have assigned to the
various hormones.

In a perfect world, I would have you all in a clinical setting and
assign various regimens to subgroups, not with any expectation of an
immediate cure, but to evaluate just what was happening. With a little
luck, answering at least the BIG questions would lead to an effective
cure. From my vantage point, everything I have read here is consistent
with steroid hormone precursor exhaustion due to abnormally high
production rate of some hormones, to cover from the LACK of the
poisoning hormone. Has anyone here had their cholesterol, pregnenolone,
or DHEA tested? If I am right, then these should be low, but again,
various people hold lots in reserve and the lab tests don’t show flow,
just level.

Steve Richfie1d

#4

2nd followup post:

This post is getting kind of complicated with numerous inserts, but I will
add my new ones in LIKE SO

Regards,

Dr. John Crisler, DO

The information contained in this message is intended only for the personal
and confidential use of the recipient(s) named above, and is protected by
state and federal law. If the reader of this message is not the intended
recipient or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended
recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this document in
error and that any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this
message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in
error, please notify us immediately, and delete the original message. We
would certainly do the same for you.

-----Original Message-----

Dr John,

Eric asked me to drop in here and see if I could figure out what is
happening with you folks. There are a number of reasons why it is easier
to fix a group than an individual with the same problem, generally by
applying epidemiological methods. THAT WILL BE VERY HELPFUL!

This is really an exciting project. I don’t need any publishing credit,
but if you keep some good notes here, I suspect that this could make a
really exciting article if you can find somewhere that will publish it
(probably not since the medical publications are all owned by the drug
companies).

  1. Rather than having everyone try the same things at the same times,
    you’ll pick and choose the experiments that YOU want to do, so that
    hopefully no more than one or two people will have to try the things
    that do NOT work. WE ARE NOT GOING TO START SHOTGUNNING POTENTIAL
    THERAPIES,
    BUT SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS ARE BEGINNING TO EMERGE.

I don’t believe in “therapies”, as most long-term medication is
ultimately damaging. FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF ILLNESSES WHICH ONLY
RESPOND TO MEDICATION, THAT IS NOT TRUE, ON BALANCE. AS AN OSTEOPATH, I
WOULD PREFER TO AVOID MEDICATION WHEREVER AND WHENEVER POSSIBLEHowever,
metabolic control problems are often
completely curable. I corrected my own low daytime body temperature in
just one day, and in the process consumed just 20 mcg of Cytomel - less
than a lot of thyroid patients take every day of their lives! Of course,
it then took a year for me to recover and learn to live at a temperature
that I hadn’t experienced since I was 5 years old. My general method of
“resetting” has since been adapted by others to reset low iron levels in
the brain, MOST AMERICAN MEN HAVE WAY TOO MUCH IRON IN THEM. BUT NOT IN
THE BRAIN?an inability to go into ketosis, and high sleeping
temperatures.IF YOU ARE REFERRING TO “NIGHT SWEATS” SAME CAN BE A SYMPTOM
OF MUCH MORE SERIOUS DISEASE

Before I came along, correcting “central” problems was presumed to be
impossible, because who could ever rewire a brain? ALTHOUGH I DO NOT KNOW
HOW TO DO IT, IT IS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE THAT THE “SETPOINTS” CAN BE
RESETYou should read the
article that Eric posted the hyperlink for to understand what this is
all about. Unfortunately, this is all buried in control theory and is
way too complex to explain in a brief posting.

As an expression of where I am presently coming from; from what I have
heard from Eric, you have all been poisoned by some noxious potion from
Merck, that probably emulates some steroid hormone(s). NO, IT IS A 5-ALPHA
REDUCTASE INHIBITOR, PREVENTING THE CONVERSION OF TESTOSTERONE INTO DHT.

OK, but then what?! You stopped taking this stuff and things aren’t
working right. Is there still some of this stuff in your system, or has
your metabolic control system just given up on converting testosterone
into DHT? FOR SOME YES, OTHERS NOWhat are the effects of DHT? DHT
IS RESPONSIBLE FOR "ALLTHINGSMALE"Can you supplement with DHT? NO, IT
IS UNHEALTHY TO DO SO, FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS. YOU WOULD SUPPLEMENT WITH
TESTOSTEORNE, THEN ALLOW ITS CONVERSION TO DHTIs
there some symptom or effect that you could use to judge your DHT level
to use to adjust dosage? LABS ARE USEFUL, BUT SUBJECTIVELY, SEXUAL
FUNCTION IS A RED FLAGObviously, I need an education here.SAME HERE

Steroid hormone
poisoning is a complex issue, because the primary effect is to
desensitize you to the poison ARE YOU REFERRING TO RECEPTOR DOWNREGULATION?

Yes, but these come in two flavors - the ones in the target organs where
the hormones have their effects, and the ones in your hypothalamus that
sense the levels. I WAS NOT AWARE THAT THE RECEPTORS FOR A GIVEN HORMONE
ARE POLYMORPHIC BETWEEN THE SOMA AND THE HYPOTHALAMUSIf these are
similarly effected than things can
recover pretty well, but if you “hit” one without hitting the other,
then you can be in real trouble.

and whatever it transforms into as your
body processes it. Then, when you stop taking this stuff your body
attempts to make more of these similar hormones to cover the shortfall
now that it has been desensitized, exhausts its reserves of hormone
precursors, you go into “steroid hormone shutdown”, I HAVE NOT HEARD THIS
PHRASE BEFORE

I got this from Stephen Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs” and other
books.WELL, THERE SHOULD BE A NEVER ENDING SUPPLY OF PRECURSORS, IF THERE
IS ENOUGH CHOLESTEROL AROUND, SAY, >140

and generally feel
like crap as all sorts of things stop working right.

Another approach is to take large doses of steroid hormone precursors
like pregnenolone, and for men, DHEA. ABSOLUTELY NOT! DHEA CONVERTS INTO
ESTROGENS IN THE MALE BODY, NOT TESTOSTERONE. THESE GUYS MUST AVOID
ELEVATING ESTROGEN LEVELS LIKE THE PLAGUE.

Please tell me about what is special about this population. THIS IS TRUE
OF ALL MEN, BUT ESPECIALLY THIS POPULATION. IN A NUTSHELL, THEY ALREADY ARE
NOT FEELING “MANLY”. INCREASING THE FEMALE SEX HORMONES IN THEM WILL ONLY
MAKE IT WORSE. ALSO, DHT INHIBITS AROMATASE, THE ENZYME WHICH CONVERTS T
INTO E. IT ALSO SHORTENS THE HALF-LIFE OF THE E RECEPTOR. THERE IS A THIRD
THING IT DOES, IN INTERACTION WITH ESTROGENS, BUT I CANNOT REMEMBER WHAT IT
IS RIGHT NOW. MAYBE IT AFFECTS MEMORY. LOL.

Note that with our screwed up American diet that has way too little
animal fat and cholesterol I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT , that people
normally run short of steroid
hormone precursors about the time that they start running short of hair,
typically in their 40s though this varies a lot. Add to this the
problems attendant with steroid hormone poisoning, and you could be in
pretty bad shape. THIS HAPPENS WHEN CHOL DROPS BELOW 140. I DO NOT THINK
MANY MEN FALL INTO THIS GROUP. USUALLY IT HAPPENS WITH STATIN DRUG OVERUSE
(A COMMON PROBLEM).

Maybe 20% of the people with low temps spontaneously reset by putting
them on a really high fat diet. These tend to be the SAME people who
have a chol level <180>BTW, interest in sex is a pretty good indicator of the condition of your

steroid hormone system. YOU BETCHA!

I THINK MANY OF THESE GENTLEMEN HAVE MORE TROUBLE
GETTING GOING IN THE MORNING, INDICATIVE OF THYROID ISSUES. THE POSSIBILITY
OF ADRENAL FATIGUE PLAYING A PART IS INTERESTING, THOUGH, AS I WOULD HAZARD
A GUESS THAT LOWERED DHT WOULD INCREASE “STRESS RESPONSE”, AND LEAD TO
ADRENAL BURNOUT IN TIME.

I would REALLY like to bundle up one of these people and see what effect
that has.I AM SURE THERE IS ALREADY A LINE FORMING

Also, low temp in the morning is also consistent with SAD (Seasonal
Affective Disorder). If one of these guys would just take a morning walk
in the bright sunlight and see if their temperature rises a lot more
quickly, when we could evaluate the SAD effect.***OR A FEW MOMENTS IN FRONT
OF A SUN LAMP, AS YOU CANOT GET MUCH SUN THIS TIME OF YEAR IN THE NORTHERN
HEMISPHERE.

Unfortunately, when you throw a monkey wrench into your metabolic
control system by taking an active hormone, your metabolic control
system can simply decide that you must be getting older and that some
things just don’t work right any more, like 98.6F. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS
LAST STATEMENT

Your hypothalamus works like a competent plant chief engineer. A common
practice both for chief engineers and for your hypothalamus is to “red
tag” things that don’t work right - to just give up on things that don’t
work. If you visit an old power plant, you see these red tags hanging
from many of the controls. Similarly, as we age, more and more things
get “red tagged” until there is no reasonable way remaining to live, and
so we die. I have a gerontologist doc friend, who has NO patients with
normal body temperatures!

***THIS IS PARCEL OF THE “NEUROENDOCRINE THEORY” OF AGING: WE AGE BECAUSE
OUR HOMRONE LEVELS DECREASE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND"

Once your metabolic
control system has given up on 98.6F, YOU ARE REFERRING TO AN ALTERED
“SETPOINT”

You have several setpoints. If you aren’t running around in the frozen
north or in a hot desert environment, you just use the 98.6F daytime and
97.4F sleeping setpoints. KEEP IN MIND, THESE ARE JUST AVERAGES, SPREAD
ACROSS THE POPULATIONThere are some interesting government studies
of how people work under extreme thermal stresses.

just curing whatever screwed you
up in the first place will NOT automatically get you running at 98.6F
again. Instead, you must usually FORCE your temperature to 98.6F HOW?

Hot tubs and saunas work for maybe 1/3 of the population. The rest need
T3 (Cytomel) and a lot of warm clothing to force this.

for an
entire day or more, and then kick it up there every morning, sometimes
for months, before your temperature will start cycling between a normal
97.4F sleeping and 98.6F waking temperature again. DO YOU HAVE ANY SOURCE
OF
REFERENCE MATERIALS DEALING WITH THIS CONCEPT I CAN STUDY?

Again, there is the hyperlink that Eric posted, and the thousands of
postings on WS-Forum.

There are hazards with all approaches. For example, if you load up on
steroid hormone precursors but don’t correct your low body temperature,
you then make a lot more than normal adrenaline to “sleep walk” at
97.something temperatures. THE COMMON THREAD OF POSSIBLE DE FACTO (I.E.
WITH
PERHAPS “NORMAL” RANGE THYROID HORMONES BUT ALL THE SYMPTOMS)
HYPOTHYROIDISM

While substantially all hypothyroid people have low temps, only maybe
20% of low temp people are hypothyroid. In one incredible case on
WS-Forum, Kim had a TSH of 280 (no, there is no decimal point here) WAS
IT REASSAYED TO VERIFY? IF THIS IS TRUE, SHE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MAINTAIN IT
FOR LONGand
she reset her temperature WITHOUT correcting her astronomical TSH! ALL
of her “hypothyroid” symptoms went away except for one - edema. SHE MAY
HAVE OTHER ISSUES AS WELLFrom
this, I currently presume the the usual spectrum of “hypothyroid”
symptoms (except for edema) are all 100% the effect of temperature and
have absolutely nothing to do with thyroidsI DO NOT THINK THIS IS A
STATEMENT WHICH CAN BE MADE. YOU CANNOT DISCOUNT THE EFFECTS OF THYROID ON
THE ENTIRE BODY, except where a bad thyroid
is responsible for the low temp.

STATUS POST FINASTERIDE USE HAS STRONGLY EMERGED THROUGH THIS FORUM. I
WOULD
NOT HAVE NECESSARILY SUSPECTED IT WERE IT NOT FOR THEIR STORIES This
stresses other systems, most importantly
your vagus nerve that suppresses your heart rate and digestion. Racing
hearts and round, firm, pot bellies (often followed by hernias) are the
most common indicators of high/exhausting vagus nerves. ALSO LARGE
AMOUNTS OF INTRABDOMINAL FAT, A RISK FACTOR OF SORTS FOR CORONARY ARTERY
DISEASE. IT ALOS CORRELATES WITH LARGE AMOUNTS OF ACCUMULATED WASTE WITHIN
THE GI TRACT. THIS STORES TOXINS FOR SURE ABSORPTION, HENCE ELEVATED CANCER
RISK, AS WELL AS THE GENERAL POISONING OF THE ENDOCRINE SYSTEM WHICH RESULTS
IN POOR PRODUCTION AND REGULATION OF SAME. PLUS, THESE PEOPLE GENERALLY ARE
NOT GETTING EXERCISE, AND THAT ELEVATES RISK OF HERNIASI fell into this
particular trap and ended up with atrial fibrillation, WHICH CAN ALSO BE
CAUSED BY ELEVATED THYROIDwhich is how I
got my education about these “little” details.

BTW Dr. John, how many FORMER atrial fib people, not on any medication,
do you know? MANY. A-FIB SPONTANEOUSLY CONVERTS FOR MANY. THE MAJORITY
WILL FIND SUCCESS WITH A SHORT DOSE OF MEDICATION TO CONTROL RATE

Fortunately, it usually
takes years for such disasters to fully develop, so a few hormone
precursor pills to figure out just what is happening shouldn’t be any
significant threat to your health.

I’ll hang around here and answers any/all questions that I can. Please
put “Steve” in the subject line to get my attention.

Does this generally sound like a direction that the rest of you are
interested in going? I CERTAINLY AM OPEN TO ANY AND ALL POSSIBILITIES HERE.

Every theory here has an experiment that someone can do to confirm/deny
it. If people are just “game” enough to try a few experiments, we should
be able to get to the bottom of things in fairly short order.

AGAIN, WELCOME ABOARD!

This should be interesting. I know, you would be excited about this if
only you weren’t suffering from it. When I was solving my atrial fib
puzzle, I had to work between attacks, generally spending my afternoons
in an unconscious condition. It took me 3 months of every-waking-hour to
completely reconstruct my own cause-and-effect chain, and another month
to engineer the one-day intervention to set me right again. My daughter
Eleanor did the same thing for her familial and wrongly believed to be a
congenital condition that some of her mother’s side family members had -
extreme morbid obesity, that she finally figured out was due to a
central inability to go into ketosis. Her cure turned out to be a
monthly cycle of switching between a zero carb diet and a high carb
diet, until she could switch back and forth in hours. Now, she can eat a
high carb breakfast, a zero carb lunch, and be into ketosis by dinner
time! This has radically changed the lives of everyone (on her mother’s
side) who had the problem. Now, she weighs less at 19 then she did at
12, and WITHOUT being on any special diet!

As you can see, this is a fundamentally different approach than is
usually taken by conventional medicine. While there isn’t always a
complete cure, I don’t believe in giving up on a true cure without first
trying. With hormone messups, you may have little choice, because taking
ANY active hormone will probably cause more problems than it cures.I
WOULD NOT SAY THAT IS TRUE. I HAVE IMPROVED TH EHEALHT AND HAPPINESS OF
LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF PATIENTS THROUGH APPROPRIATELY ADMINISTERED TRT
Steve Richfie1d

#5

3rd followup

Dr John,

This is what makes what has happened to you all so confusing–some do not
restore hormonal production (including perhaps DHT) and others do. Having
appropriate hormone levels, but still suffering the symptoms, complicates
the issue(s).

However, such tidbits certainly narrows things down a bit. Perhaps the
REAL problem has nothing to do with DHT? Perhaps normal DHT levels don’t
work any more? Perhaps their metabolic control system has “flipped” to
some unknown/unusual mode of operation to survive some plight of a
million years ago? Perhaps DHT doesn’t really control what people think
it controls, but Finasteride tablets also affects the other unrecognized
hormone? Perhaps the things that used to be controlled by DHT now honor
some other control mechanism after a long absense of DHT? Perhaps…

Obviously if we sit here and wait for answers to these and similar
questions, your problems will outlive you. If someone were to take some
DHT, the prompt effects would certainly tell us if it was still “in the
loop” and narrow this down a lot. ***SUPPLEMENITNG DHT WILL INHIBIT THE
HPTA. THIS WILL AFFECT EVERYTHING IN THE BODY. IT THEREFORE LOWERS
ENDOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE PRODUCTION. YOU ALSO CAN THEM HAVE TOO LITTLE
ESTROGEN AS WELL. IT ALSO CAUSES ACCUMULATION OF INTRABDOMINAL FAT, WHICH IS
BAD FOR CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH.Resetting temperatures and/or trying
some hormone precursors would also do a lot of narrowing down.

If you could locate some more doctors with these problems, you could
take turns trying such things with a keen observational eye for effects.
I would think that 3 or 4 trained medical observers trying things would
be enough to close on this in pretty short order.

An out-of-the-box thought: If you were the low man on the totem pole in
a primitive society and all the alpha male left you from the kill was
the prostate, then it SHOULD decrease your fertility to reduce your
chance or reproducing :sunglasses:

Steve Richfie1d

#6

Dr Crisler quotes, "I can fathom a mechanism where severely reduced DHT levels could increase conversion of T4 to rT3Reverse T3. "

INTERSTING JN?

#7

Hi All,

I believe that our condition is Autoimmunity in DHT or less likely 5AR. This is not Resistance, i have posted yesterday my views on PFS using the wrong title. This is Autoimmunity.

Since DHT exists in the skin, adrenals and quite possibly hypothalamus, thalamus and frontal cortex then we are definitely screwed …

If our immune system attacks all of these regions then say hello to Thyroid, Mental, Neurological problems.

When i got a Finasteride crash i got :

  1. Hives all over my body
  2. Tinnitus
  3. Joint Pains
  4. My mouth seemed to be swollen and also my eyelids
  5. Impotence
  6. Hypothyroidism (This was the only thing that was found in Tests)

It was as if my immune system got out of control. To this day (after almost 11 years) i still have problems which i will not write here.

As far as i can tell it is DHT Autoimmunity. I doubt that it is autoimmunity to 5AR or Receptors.

#8

I agree. there is something wrong with immune system. I got accupucture and got hives after five or six session. These were on my back and chest. Doctor said it is fungus and Eczema and gave me a cream to treat it. I did not use the cream but after stopping AP, hives disappeared/became very light in 2-3 months. I am sure if start AP again, I will get hives again. My WBC has been high but doctor does not know the cause.