just say no...,

NYTimes | One afternoon a few months ago, a 45-year-old sales representative named Mike called “The Dr. Harry Fisch Show,” a weekly men’s health program on the Howard Stern channel on Sirius XM Radio, where no male medical or sexual issue goes unexplored. 

“I feel like a 70-year-old man in a 45-year-old body,” Mike, from Vancouver, British Columbia, told Dr. Fisch on the live broadcast. “I want to feel good. I don’t want to feel tired all day.”

A regular listener, Mike had heard Dr. Fisch, a Park Avenue urologist and fertility specialist, talk about a phenomenon called “low testosterone” or “low T.” Dr. Fisch likes to say that a man’s testosterone level is “the dipstick” of his health; he regularly appears on programs like “CBS This Morning” to talk about the malaise that may coincide with low testosterone. He is also the medical expert featured on IsItLowT.com, an informational website sponsored by AbbVie, the drug maker behind AndroGel, the best-selling prescription testosterone gel. 

Like many men who have seen that site or commercials or online quizzes about “low T,” Mike suspected that diminished testosterone was the cause of his lethargy. And he hoped, as the marketing campaigns seem to suggest, that taking a prescription testosterone drug would make him feel more energetic. 

“I took your advice and I went and got my testosterone checked,” Mike told Dr. Fisch. Mike’s own physician, he related, told him that his testosterone “was a little low” and prescribed a testosterone medication. 

Mike also said he had diabetes and high blood pressure and was 40 pounds overweight. Dr. Fisch explained that conditions like obesity might be accompanied by decreased testosterone and energy, and he urged Mike to exercise more and to lose weight. But if Mike had trouble overhauling his diet and exercise habits, Dr. Fisch said, taking testosterone might give him the boost he needed to do so.

“If it gives you more energy to exercise,” Dr. Fisch said of the testosterone drug, “I’m all for it.”

Recommendations like Dr. Fisch’s and the marketing of low T as a common medical condition helped propel sales of testosterone gels, patches, injections and tablets to about $2 billion in the United States last year, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. In 2002, sales were reported to be a mere $324 million; around that time, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, which was then marketing AndroGel, began using the term “low T,” replacing a previous euphemism for male aging, “andropause.” Today the low-T trend is global. From 2000 to 2011, there was “a major and progressive increase” in testosterone use in 37 countries, according to a recent study published in the Medical Journal of Australia.