Dr. Jen Gunter

If someone comes into your office and they've got a receding hairline, if they have acne, if they have signs of excess testosterone, absolutely, they need to have their testosterone level checked.

Completely different situation.

But there's no low level that's considered abnormal.

So I think that's a really important thing.

I get that it interferes with some people's messaging on social media, but you know, all of the data I'm giving you is from Professor Sue Davis from Australia, who's, you know,

probably study testosterone for women the most, pretty close to it.

I mean, I'm sure there's a few other people, but, you know, she's a world, a world expert.

She does the studies.

And one of the issues we have is that, you know, many of the studies on testosterone are done with using radioimmunoassays, which are inaccurate in the female range.

So if you're basing what you're telling people off of studies that we now know are inaccurate, that's probably not a good thing.

And so you really need, you know, mass spectrometry, which isn't available everywhere.

You know, I still see studies now.

I mean, you know, I read some recent study that supposedly supported, you know, higher testosterone levels of brain health and they use radio immunoassay.

Oh, vital for bone health, brain health, you know, prevention of dementia, prevention of heart disease, you name it, family view, everything.

And so the best that we can say is that testosterone, when we give it to people and keep it in the female dose, in the female range, and that's why we have to do levels after.

So we recommend doing levels before you start to make sure someone isn't too high.

because you wouldn't want to start them in, and then to make sure that they stay in the typical female range.

Otherwise, you can get problems.

And people can be very sensitive to it, and some people can even have vocal changes when their testosterone level is kept in the normal range because obviously they could have some excursions.

And that might be a concern to someone who uses their voice professionally, a singer or a news anchor or someone like that.