Men’s Health: What is Andropause?!
Written by Dr. Dan Geck

Call your doctor if erection lasts more than four hours. Use of this drug is not advisable if you have cardiovascular risk. Do not use if you have low blood pressure, liver or kidney impairment, recent stroke or heart attack. Side effects may include blurred vision, loss of peripheral vision, sudden hearing loss, stroke, or heart attack.

If you have heard this before you may have thought to yourself, “There has to be a better way!” Male hormone problems are serious and more common than you would think, but because they are not easy to talk about, they are often not brought up in the office. I will bridge that gap in this article.

The information in this article can be found in most medical physiology textbooks, particularly Guyton’s Medical Physiology. The application of this information comes from years of experience and hundreds of hours of accredited post-doctoral education in a field called Functional Endocrinology. The focus is to restore proper function to the body before it reaches a diseased state.

Why do men seem to have less initiative, less stamina, more irritability, and varying degrees of erectile dysfunction as they age? Is it part of a natural aging process? Do men go “andropause” like women go through menopause?

We know that a woman is fertile only during certain years of her life. Within those years, there are only a few specific days each month in which she is fertile. In other words, every month she cycles between fertile and non-fertile. When she passes beyond the years of fertility, she actually stops cycling and goes thorough a major shift in their life. This shift is called menopause.

Men are very different. As long as there is no dysfunction, once a man is fertile he is always fertile. He is fertile every day of every month; he has no cycle. And there is never a point in his life when fertility stops. There are no major shifts in a man’s fertility or hormone levels.

So what is andropause? Simply put, it is an abnormal shift in a man’s hormones levels. Men and women have the same hormones; we just have different amounts of those hormones. The hormones that predominate in men are called androgens. In men, androgens should be more powerful than estrogens; this is called androgen-dominance and it is the natural state of being for a man. When men lose androgen-dominance we refer to it as andropause.

The major androgenic hormone is testosterone. When it is functioning properly, together with all of his other hormones, a man has vigor, stamina, focused initiative, healthy libido, good memory, and he appreciates life. When he loses androgen dominance he can become withdrawn, he can have sleep problems, fatigue, erectile dysfunction, irritability, and so on.

Since the main androgenic hormone is testosterone, practitioners are tempted to just give men more testosterone. They have forgotten that these hormones are interactive, that in giving hormones as if they are supplements, you can actually make the problem worse six months down the road.

When you supplement with hormones, they can actually interfere with other hormones or even convert into a different hormone! Several men with erectile dysfunction actually have the problem where their body converts testosterone into estrogen. They can lose androgen dominance this way. Obviously, we can’t fix the problem by giving more testosterone because he’ll convert it into more estrogen.

In my experience, men often need more specific help to balance their hormones and health. After running the proper and specific tests, we find that many men need support for their adrenal glands or even their pituitary gland to bring balance back to the system. I have recommended specific herbal preparations for this with patients in my office and they have responded extremely well in their health and hormone balance.

If a man takes the nutrients to help his body make hormones again, he can often pull himself out of this problem. Supplements such as wheat germ oil, tillandsia root, whole food Vitamin E, and animal glandular products have the building blocks the body uses to make androgen hormones.

In any case, we should look at the whole system and think like the body thinks when recommending health care. I have seen the body recover from so many things after balancing hormones and correcting function. I am convinced that you have more vitality than you will ever realize. That’s why the five words that are not allowed in my office are: “I must be getting old.”