Are You the Fourteenth Man?

I’m Dan. My training is as a research scientist. My job is taking on patients’ difficult problems and solving them using science. I understand scientific studies and their limitations. I also understand the importance of personal experience in the real world.

Sometimes it takes years to solve a patient’s health issues. Sometimes it literally takes years just to understand what those issues are – and the search for a solution can’t even start until that point. I believe that the purpose of medicine is changing people’s lives for the better, and that an extremely difficult problem calls for an extraordinary effort to solve it. That’s why I was drawn to the case of the 14 men who were studied by my colleague Tracey. Tracey is a medical doctor whose specialty is consulting on persistently difficult cases – cases that haven’t been solved by conventional approaches.

All 14 men had similar symptoms (extreme fatigue, signs of premature aging, decreasing muscle mass, low libido, poor sexual performance, decreasing job performance) which had been bothering them for between 12 and 24 months, were 30 to 75 years of age, had similar backgrounds (all were Americans from families who’d been in this country for over 100 years), had formerly been very fit and energetic, and had had little or no success in solving their symptoms after consulting with their regular physicians.

These men came from a cohort of 196 men with similar symptoms who were studied at Tracey’s lab. All of the other men besides these 14, that’s 182 of them, found an answer for their fatigue and weakness and flabbiness and poor performance using conventional therapies as applied by their general practitioners (GPs). Some discovered they had developed food allergies previously unknown to them. Some found out that a lifetime of poor diet had finally caught up with them. Some had hidden cancers they hadn’t known about sapping their strength. A few others had gut parasites, or biomes that were seriously out of balance. Another part of the group had started abusing tobacco, alcohol, or other substances. Others had totally stopped exercising and made themselves weak in that way.

But one out of 14 – coincidentally, that’s also 14 men – after one to two years of suffering, had still not been able to discover the cause of their crippling symptoms. Their general practitioners hadn’t been able to find an answer for them. Their diets and exercise regimens were fine. They had no allergies, no hidden cancers or other maladies. They didn’t abuse drugs or have gut issues. Every test on other issues that their GPs gave them came back negative, too.

These 14 men should have been healthy. But they weren’t.

And nothing they’d tried had done a bit of good.

Enter Tracey. Tracey is trained in, among many other things, recognizing the symptoms of adult-onset human growth hormone deficiency. And she’s also very aware that the quick, simple, inexpensive test that is now available to check for HGH deficiency, is almost never used by general practitioners. They just aren’t trained to recommend or administer it. Which, as Tracey says, is an easily preventable oversight. Tracey sent the men to our clinic for an evaluation. They took the test. And in every single case the men had abnormally low levels of HGH – a condition for which, happily, there is a safe and well-proven, well-established cure: hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.

So, if you are experiencing any of these life-diminishing, crippling symptoms, and ordinary tests and treatments seem to be doing little to know good, Tracey believes that it’s worth considering the possibility that you might be “the fourteenth man,” just like the men she studied. Adult-onset HGH deficiency is totally curable, but tragically many men wait years upon years to get tested for it. Don’t take chances; get tested today!