Benefits of Testosterone – Tom’s Story

Learn about the benefits of testosterone for men. Tom shares how he got his energy and his life back: “[Today] I feel great. I’m 57 years old. I can do as many push ups, pull ups and sit ups as a senior in high school.”

Video Transcript:

Deborah: If women go through menopause, does that mean men go through women-o-pause? Actually they do, but it’s called andropause and it’s often overlooked or misdiagnosed and can cause all kinds of problems. Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, is here with us to discuss this natural, yet undiagnosed problem in older men, also with us is Tom Stallman. Good morning.

Dr. Hotze: Good morning to you, Deborah.

Tom: Good morning, Deborah.

Deborah: All right, I want to ask the ladies in the audience, how many of you know that your men have gone through the change? Acting up, aren’t they? All right, so we’re joking about this, but really it does happen with men.

Dr. Hotze: It does. Testosterone is the natural male hormone that men make starting at puberty, which governs male pattern behavior and male sex characteristics. As men age, their testosterone level declines. It reaches a peak in their early to mid twenties and after that it begins to decline, so by the time a man’s forty, it’s about half the level it was when he was in his twenties. When he’s fifty it’s a third, when he’s at sixty it’s a fourth. That’s huge because testosterone impacts a man’s behavior. The way man thinks. The way man feels about himself. The way man looks and his abilities.

Deborah: How come we just don’t really talk about that?

Dr. Hotze: Well, men don’t like to admit that things aren’t as good as they used to be.

Deborah: Were things just not as good as they used to be for you?

Tom: Amen.

Deborah: What was happening?

Tom: Well, I’d gone through …I’m a land manager out southwest of Houston on the prairie. I have to work in the heat. I went through a difficult period under a lot of stress for a long period of time, not realizing what stress can do to you. I had something like a heat stroke and my thyroid was damaged. My adrenal glands were just hammered. Lost them. Suddenly, life changed for me. I felt bad all the time. Lost my heat tolerance. I’d lost my thermostat, couldn’t regulate my temperature. I’m supposed to live on the prairie and work out there.

Deborah: Yeah.

Tom: Shimmering heat waves and all of that and you can’t stand the heat. I couldn’t get sound sleep anymore, had insomnia, and had night sweats. I didn’t know what andropause was at the time.

Deborah: Kind of sounds like menopause, doesn’t it?

Tom: I had it, I mean just as bad as bad as anything you’ve ever had ladies. I ached all over. All of my joints ached. Lost my stamina. I had trained all my life, had been something of an athlete and suddenly you just had no strength and no stamina and as far as your demeanor, have you seen the movie “Grumpy Old Men”?

Deborah: Yes.

Tom: That’s a loss of testosterone.

Deborah: That’s what my mom says, she’s like, “Load up, load up honey.”

Tom: That’s it. I wouldn’t know where to start. What am I leaving out?

Deborah: Really, when all that stuff is happening to you, because, you know, I have a thyroid issue and so I just felt like I was losing my mind, and you know, you start to think the worse, is it something really, really serious that I’m dealing with here? It is serious, but what kind of things entered your mind?

Tom: Eventually, it got so bad. Out of sheer discipline, I just kept persevering. I went to different doctors. No one could really help me.

Deborah: What were they saying to you? Or were they giving you things to address the symptoms and not coming up with …

Tom: Yes, you’ve had heat stroke. Yes, your thyroid is crippled. You’ve lost the thermostat, you can’t control your body temperature. I’ll tell you what you need to do. You need to live like a lizard. When it gets cold, find some place warm. When it gets warm, find some place cold.

Dr. Hotze: Can you imagine that?

Tom: For the rest of your life.

Deborah: Basically, they said, “Deal with it.”

Tom: Yeah. Deal with it.

Deborah: Dr. Hotze, this is like a situation where you kind of go, “Wow, severe.” Not all situations are that severe. It’s just a natural moment that those hormones start to decline and people start to feel it.

Dr. Hotze: Well, the decline normally is gradual. In Tom’s case, the stress that he was living under in a business situation and the heat stroke kind of precipitated a crash, which lasted for about ten years.

Tom: For ten years.

Dr. Hotze: Before you came to our center, as a matter of fact, you told me that you felt like you were on the way out.

Tom: I wasn’t sure how long I’d be alive. Then I met him.

Deborah: Getting out of bed every day was harder and harder, wasn’t it?

Tom: Yeah.

Dr. Hotze: This is a common presentation in both men and women in our center, as the hormone levels decline, the sex hormone levels, the thyroid hormone levels, our adrenal hormones, as they decline it has a tremendous adverse impact on our health and the way we feel. What does it lead to? Fatigue, difficulty with weight, inability to focus and think clearly, maybe cold sensitivities. Joint and muscle aches and pains.

Deborah: Part of what we call aging.

Dr. Hotze: Right, sure. It’s a natural occurrence but it’s not healthy and it can be reversed by simply replenishing the body with the hormones that are declining. The same identical hormones. We call those bioidentical hormones.

Deborah: Right, right and is part of that just the fact that we outlive what parts of our body intended to do?

Dr. Hotze: Well, that’s right, as we age our glands that make the hormones, the chemical messengers that instruct our cells what to do, as we age our endocrine glands, the glands that make the hormones decline in their production. Our cells don’t know what to do, and they don’t do much so then we get middle aged and we get all these symptoms and we go see the doctors and they do various blood tests and because the blood tests, the range is so broad, they tell us everything like they told Tom…

Deborah: Live like a lizard.

Dr. Hotze: Learn to live with it or else they end up giving us antidepressants and sleep medications and anti-inflammatory…

Deborah: Treating the symptoms but not the cause.

Dr. Hotze: Right.

Deborah: All right. You mentioned bioidentical, what is that compared to regular medication?

Dr. Hotze: Well, bioidentical hormones are the same identical hormone molecular structure that your body made when you were younger in adequate amounts.

Deborah: Your body produced on its own.

Dr. Hotze: Right. Your body thinks it’s its own and it acts like its own and it works like your natural hormones work as opposed to counterfeit hormones that aren’t the same structure, and that have a host of side effects and that’s what’s dangerous. Like the Premarin and Prempro and the fact that there is a counterfeit testosterone called methyl-testosterone. Why would they change something that was natural into another structure? They can patent it and make a profit on it.

Deborah: There are a lot of people who would disagree with you on that. There are a lot of professionals that will say, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s not true.” Your argument is?

Dr. Hotze: Well, let me just tell you, drug companies are in the business of making profits, which there is nothing wrong with a profit, but to create drugs that have severe adverse affects and pawn those on the American public, I think is really unethical at best.

Deborah: All right, and let me just ask you, how do you feel today?

Tom: I feel great. In fact, I’m 57 years old. I can do as many push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups as when I was a senior in high school.

Deborah: Drop it, drop it right now. I want some push-ups right now, as we go to break here.

Tom Stallman: Okay, how many do you need? (Tom is doing pushups on the set!)

Deborah: There you go. You can find out at www.HotzeHWC.com. All right.