Derek (More Plates More Dates)

Or you would also see some sort of like structural defects.

And that's where you would get into like, you know, ultrasounding for, I think the prevalence in males is like 15% of males have a varicocele.

I don't know if you know what that is, but it's like varicose veins in your testes essentially.

And it looks like, like twisted kind of like,

The same thing you would see in varicose veins in your legs.

It's like in the side of like the testes and it inhibits thermoregulation and significantly impedes testosterone production locally and fertility.

So that is,

Often time well 15% of men from what I recall is the number for prevalence pretty significant though for something a lot of people don't know exists and if you are, you know doing all the lifestyle stuff and it's not working and You think you're doing everything correctly and you must need testosterone Sometimes it can be overlooked that there are structural defects.

So like typically the first thing you would look to is like

am I capable at the organ of responding to the signal?

And like, is the signal adequate to begin with?

Because if there's like a primary hypogonadal outcome, it would be some sort of like structural response problem in the testes themselves.

if that's not an issue and you've ruled out all structural problems, you know, age-related decline is not a factor and you're, you know, otherwise, you know, everything's all accounted for from that angle, you would look upstream to the pituitary and say, okay, well, at that point, am I producing enough LH and FSH?

And this is typically the outcome you would see in men, uh,

not always but like a lot of men who are kind of like not sure if they need testosterone they'll have like a relative proportional inadequate signaling driven through a myriad of factors including but not limited to lifestyle some age-related decline toxins exposures a myriad of things and that's kind of like where people have this uh

opportunity to try and incrementally maximize all the areas in their life to try and improve the output.

Because if you have sufficient functioning organs and your output is just insufficient, you might be able to get that up to snuff to where you need it just by getting leaner, losing body fat, fixing your diet, addressing micronutrient deficiencies, quitting smoking, not drinking anymore, fixing your sleep, you know, all the smorgasbord of things.

SHBG, sex hormone-binding globulin.

Yeah, and it gets really complicated in this regard because what a lot of people don't address is, so DHT, dihydrotestosterone, mentioned earlier how it's like the primary hormone that will determine if you reach full maturity in adolescence.

It will still be markedly male probably if you have adequate testosterone production, but you won't get full maturation if you have zero DHT from a defect in the enzyme that encodes for 5-alpha reductase or something.