Do You Really Need Testosterone Replacement Therapy?

While the drug is mostly safe, how online companies push it may not be

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I often discuss article topics with my wife and have never heard her jump at an idea faster than this one. I brought up testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) as my next story idea.

“Men at work talk about testosterone constantly,” she said. “You should definitely write an article on that.”

Even though I’m a doctor, I knew very little about TRT before diving deep into the research. It is not a commonly used medication in a general clinical setting, so I never got much training on it in residency. But now the drug is becoming more popular. Sadly there is a lot of on social media like TikTok. That’s because most of these health “influencers” are not actually health professionals. But in the United States testosterone is a controlled drug and must be prescribed by a physician.

Misleading medical information seems just as prevalent, if not more in our faces, than real scientific data these days. Over the last 20 years, TRT prescriptions have increased between . Since many prescriptions come from direct-to-consumer companies, the exact numbers are hard to pin down. But more so than increased numbers, there is a concern that a lot of these…