More on the testosterone travesty. The 6minutes Newsletter, a publication of the Medical Journal of Australia, has clarified the guidelines for the prescribing of testosterone for men. If ever one wanted to see the worst example of government meddling in medicine, based on advice from ill-informed experts, this is it. To read the full article and comments, go here:
http://www.6minutes.com.au/News/Latest-news/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-testosterone-pres?mid=2ae3cfbda8&utm_source=Cirrus+Media+Newsletters&utm_campaign=91875eeb50-6minutes+Newsletter+-+20150604060000&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fe913f1856-91875eeb50-59874885
How on earth the decision to lower the ‘normal‘ low testosterone number to 6 nmol/L was made is, to say the least, disturbing. There is not a shred of medically based scientific evidence that 6 nmol/L is anything like normal for all males out there. This highlights the problem with the word NORMAL. There is no such thing when it is is based on the collection of a communities’ blood samples, which are then grouped together, and from those numbers, a ‘normal range’ is established. If your lab test result is a number within that range, then there is nothing wrong with you, according to the experts. How does that explain a male whose daily testosterone is around 35 nmol/L, whose level then falls to 22 nmol/L and has symptoms of testosterone deficiency being told that he is normal despite being symptomatic: yet another male is doing perfectly well with a testosterone of 15 mol/L and he actually is clinically normal? Normal is what applies to you, and you only, and should be based on clinical grounds, not something taken from a list of numbers that applies to the rest of the world.
In the first man’s case, a level of 15 nmol/L would be absolutely abnormal and he would need testosterone augmentation. The second male who is physiologically normal and clinically normal with a testosterone level of 15 nmol/L would not need augmenting. Normal should only apply to the clinical picture and NOT some arbitrary number taken from a laboratory report that has no clinical applicability to a particular individual. The abuse of normal has been taken to great heights in the never ending fiasco of Australia’s understanding of endocrine function. We are, to put it bluntly, right in the Stone Age.
Suppose all the male members in your family are over 185 cm tall but because you were born prematurely and had poor nutrition in the first 2 years of your life and you grew to 172 cm tall. You would be normal by standard criteria but actually you would NOT be normal, because you are not the optimal you! There is a huge difference between being normal and being optimal. The professors in the Australian Universities can’t seem to figure this out and so not only is their advice to the Government, uninformed, it is dangerous.
Once, Australian medicine was world class with innovation and the acceptance of new ideas being the norm. We pioneered, along with New Zealand, treatments to stop babies being born prematurely, and gave the babies medicines to stop them from dying from malfunctioning lungs. We replaced hips with metal ones based on work done in Britain. We used fetal monitors to detect abnormalities of oxygenation during labor based on work done in the USA.
NONE OF THIS WOULD HAPPEN NOW.
Something happened. Was it lawyers? Lack of money in the system? Corrupted professors and researchers by industrial grants and paid talks overseas (read: vacations)?
My guess, it is all of the above. I hope we have a clean-out of the brain clogged experts, eliminate the corruption of industry grants and start to reward the free thinkers. We have long since abandoned Evidence based Medicine for Eminence based Medicine, where new idea resistance abounds because that would interfere with lots of money coming into the coffers of Universities and organisations that fund research into things like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
April 1, 2015, was indeed another sad day for the Australian male. Is there no one, uncorrupted, in responsible positions who will stand up for him? Hello darkness, my old friend….