Your right to your opinion is uncontested. The rest of your post highlights the problem: you are approaching this discussion with the supposition that you know better and the rest of us need to be educated.
It isn't that I think I know better, that's not true. I have however done extensive research, not only anecdotal but also from the VERY few people in the medical profession, who have dared to go outside the lines that have been drawn up by the medical hierarchy.
I have a very good friend in a different country, that was almost struck off, because he disagreed with the norms of the hierarchy.
If you look at the results from lab work on blood, you will see the so-called "normal" levels of total testosterone. On mine, it gives the following : -
Age 7 - 19 2.25 - 27 nmol/L (labs use different units to confuse and confound)
Age 29 - 49 8.64 - 29 nmol/L
Age >=50. 8.68 - 25.7 nmol/L
Translated into different units : -
Age 7 - 19 65 - 779 ng/do
Age 29 - 49 249 - 836 ng/dl
Age >=50. 250 - 741 ng/dl
Basically, this gives so much leeway that 'doctors' can safely ignore it. My friend took a sort of mean of the upper and lower 29 - 49 values and arrived at a figure of around 650 ng/dl. If patients came to him showing ANY of the signs of low testosterone, he would start them on so-called 'natural' testosterone boosters, (a really bad idea to prescribe herbal stuff and not expensive meds), and exercise. He didn't treat the symptoms. If the symptoms got worse, I guess he would do something about it, but if not, after 3 months he would do more blood work and if the T was still as low, he would start them on a 2 month course of T injections. He told me that in 90% of cases, this would solve the problem.
He later found out that some patients with relatively high t values, still showed low T symptoms and then he would start to look at Free T. He was the person who actually persuaded me to DEMAND a free T result. His findings were that In some people, the total t could be well within the limits, but the Free T was exceptionally low. Once again, treating the low Free T with T injections, solved the problem.
I agree, as no doubt would he, had he not been killed in a car accident earlier this year, that if Total T is low, it's more than likely that Free T will also be low. What I do disagree with however, is that a high Total T does not necessarily mean a high Free T.
According to my quack here, my Total T of 484 was way above normal for a man of 72. But my Free T WHEN I finally got it checked was almost ZERO. Ergo, my statement that taken on its own, Total T is meaningless, because it doesn't mean that even if it's very high, that it isn't all bound up to globulin and albumin.
Without adequate FREE T a patient will exhibit all the symptoms of low T (as I did), the quack will ignore this and prescribe medication to treat the SYMPTOMS, missing the cause completely (which is what they have been carefully trained to do).
