Everyone is on testosterone

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Today, Explained 27 min 6 speakers 2 chapters transcribed 2 months ago
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Why are so many people—men and women—using testosterone today?

Unknown 0:04
Men want more. Women also want more. You know what I'm talking about. Testosterone.
Rihanna Cruz 0:23
Today on Today Explained, the hormone of which ladies and germs cannot get enough. Everyone's on T. Should they be? Stay tuned.
Unknown 0:54
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
Noam Hassenfeld 1:03
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Noam Hassenfeld 1:54
It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.
Rebecca Jackson 2:23
So the number one thing I think that doctors don't prescribe, which is a shame, is... Today Explained.
Today Explained.
Rihanna Cruz 2:31
Medical professionals, your doctors, your nurses, wrote 11 million prescriptions for testosterone in the U.S. last year. That was up from 7.3 million five years earlier. But a lot of people are also getting tea, sometimes in troubling doses. I had to take mine down because I was like, it was like I was humping everything. Yeah, you'll just hump and hump and hump away. From nutritionists, med spas, wellness centers. Susan Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, recently wrote about the women taking tea.
Susan Dominus 3:01
In recent months, I've just been seeing the topic come up much more among influencers. Ladies, low libido, brain fog, depression, anxiety, low testosterone.
Rihanna Cruz 3:12
Do you notice a difference with it?
Susan Dominus 3:14
I do. Me too.
Rihanna Cruz 3:15
Yeah, I know. And I have more energy. I found it again. I found my libido.
Susan Dominus 3:21
Right? My friend started talking to me about their experiences with it. And I heard some kind of incredible stories about what happened to women when they went on unusually high doses of it. You know, that idea that a hormone could have such a hold, not just on how you felt physically, but how you felt emotionally and in relationship to other people. That was a really intriguing idea to me.
Rihanna Cruz 3:42
What is this hormone? What does testosterone do exactly?
Susan Dominus 3:45
And who has it? So both men and women have testosterone. Men have literally 10 times the amount of this hormone that women do. And it is something that declines gradually in men over time. But in women, who of course have much less of it to begin with, it actually diminishes over time even more dramatically, so that by the time they are around 60, they have about half of the amount of testosterone circulating through their body that they had in their, let's say, early 20s. And it's produced by both the ovaries and the adrenal glands in women, but it is only produced by the adrenal glands by that point in women's lives.
Rihanna Cruz 4:25
As women have less testosterone over time, what starts to happen?
Susan Dominus 4:28
What changes? Well, we're not exactly sure, to be honest. It's one of these situations in which we know what happens when you replenish their testosterone, which is that if you restore women to the levels of testosterone that that they had in their 30s when they are actually, let's say, in their 50s, there's a lot of research that suggests that it restores some of their libido and other things such as mood or energy.
Rihanna Cruz 4:56
And in your article, you very hilariously described what happens when women start taking testosterone. It was inspiring. Tell us what you learned.
Susan Dominus 5:06
So there's, I mean, there's really two very different experiences, right?

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