Why Blood Tests of T And T Free Alone Don’t Reveal How You Will Respond to Hormones
Channel: BioBalance Healthcast
Date: 26/12/2023

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At Bio Balance Health I order blood tests to evaluate my future patients before I even have my first appointment with them.  I use them to find a baseline for an individual patient, and to see if hormones will help them with their symptoms.  Blood tests work well for establishing a diagnosis but are not the only factor in determining an ideal dose of hormone that works for that patient.  Symptoms and medical history supply most of the information for determining dosage as well as help me find other medical problems to treat at the same visit. Many diseases in the early stages are not treated by primary care doctors because they are overwhelmed with their number of patients and the short-time they are allowed to see them.  Our goal is to prevent disease that have been missed or treat conditions at an early stage before they become severe.

Blood tests establish and confirm both hormone deficiencies and provide a baseline level before treatment and the optimal level for each individual patient.   That blood level may or may not be within the range that is expected for a treatment success (written on the lab report). You are an individual and it is my job to find the ideal blood level of hormones for you.

Why would the blood level not tell the whole story?

Your body is genetically programed to both PRODUCE hormones from your endocrine glands and ACCEPT those same hormones in each cell.  Every person is an individual and each person makes hormones based on their genetic map and environment. Everyone is programed genetically to accept hormones into their cells in an individual manner. This is the key to understanding the differences between patients’ responses to an equivalent dose of hormones, either excreted from their own glands or absorbed through their chosen delivery system (oral, vaginal, transdermal or subdermal pellets) after their glands have aged and don’t produce enough hormone, like estradiol and testosterone.

I was in Cambridge in 2014 for the release of my first book, The Secret Female Hormone, when I visited a medical bookstore.  I discovered a large red book that weighed no less than 10 lbs was titled Testosterone.  I looked through this book and found that there was information that I had not discovered in my research of the American medical journals and books, so I bought it and read some of it on the long flight home to St. Louis, MO. I found that this book had answers to questions I had uncovered in my then,13 years of hormone medical practice. My biggest question at that time was why 2 people of the same sex having the equivalent blood level of free testosterone often feel completely different. For example, I was trained that if a man had a blood level of free testosterone that was above 129 pg/ml and under 350 pg/ml (using Quest Diagnostics lab), then he should feel normal, like he did when he was in his thirties (barring any other illnesses interfering). However, I observed that some men felt great at 110 pg/ml while others at 130 continued to have the symptoms of low T. This puzzled me, but at that time I had no answer. Then I read the first chapter of Testosterone.

The answer is found in the individual differences in the receptors on each cell for that hormone, the receiving end of the hormone physiology.  It informed me that receptor sites are genetically created differently in each individual and that one-size-does-not-fit-all! 

You can bathe a person’s cells with what is considered an adequate blood concentration of testosterone for most people, let’s say men since that was the subject of the first chapter, of the book Testsosterone, but some men would receive and use only a small portion of the circulating hormone. Their cells were “resistant”, therefore they required a higher concentration of hormone, to activate their cells. This very important fact in endocrinology has been ignored until recently when we began to use genetics to find the differences between individuals’ receptor sites for all hormones and all peptide communicators. In the last 10 years we have found that receptor sites are the missing link in determining a person’s required dose of a hormone, and they are genetically determined.

Here is an example from the book in a very simplified translation. Think of a key and lock. Each cell has “locks” or receptor sites all over it, and the keys are the testosterone molecules.  Some people’s cells have locks that are easy to open and turn on a cell. They are “sensitive” to that hormone.  Some cells have difficult “locks” and they must be bombarded with a hormone “keys” to turn the cells on. This led the researchers to look for the snips of DNA that were responsible for the difference. They found them and then tested men from all over the world to see if there were regional groups, genetic groups, that contained more sensitive receptor sites or more resistant.