You must be seeing loads of ads and promotions about hormone treatments that promise height, charm, anti-aging, weight loss, and sexual adroitness. However, the truth is that their efficacy is debatable but the consequences are really dangerous. Some doctors deliberately don’t mention about the hazards because it’s their business. Like there are crooks in every business, there are crooks in health business too. The world we live in today is one of instant indulgence. An obsessed person is in rush of looking slim, an athletic guy needs to boost his physical performance in a blaze, a middle-aged man/woman has to turn sexually adroit overnight, and the ageing woman seeks to look younger at once. All of these people are in a position to use or misuse hormone therapy in completing their personal pursuit. Down the line, the eagerness of doing it all in one go takes them literally nowhere. Many doctors end up advocating and luring their patients into hormone treatments for anything to everything, but we as responsible humans should know that ageing is a natural process with which our hormone levels gradually decline. The hormone treatment brigade thinks differently – they assume that we age because of our own issues and by pumping hormones, they can restore the age. People who use these hormones are potentially inviting life-threatening situation. Perhaps, one of the most misused hormones is the anabolic steroid. Its use was initially limited to the competitive sport but because of effective means of detection, such instances have dramatically fallen. Anabolic steroids increase muscle mass and decrease body fat. Such performance-enhancing drugs cause acne, facial hair in women, breast development and testicle shrinking in men, along with infertility, depression, insomnia, liver damage, high blood pressure, and mood swings and what not!
These hormones come in all forms as injections, oral pills or applied as a cream. Many users adopt a process called “cycling”, where they take the drug and withdraw after a time to give the body rest. Others use the “stacking” method — taking more than two or multiple steroids at a time. A number of studies have established that testosterone concentration decreases with age. This age-related decline of testosterone starts in the third decade of life. The decline has been termed as andropause, which is actually a misnomer. Surveys suggest that testosterone is associated with increased appendicular skeletal muscle mass and strength. Testosterone therapy increases the strength of vertebrae but not the thighbone. Contrary to the popular opinion, testosterone neither helps depression/cognitive function, nor ups the risk of fracture. Although instances of prostatic cancer with testosterone are sparse, there is a concern that it may exacerbate subclinical cancer or heart disease. Very low testosterone levels are associated with a decreased sexual desire, reduced frequency of sexual intercourse, inability to maintain an erection, loss of muscle mass, decreased beard growth, and increase in the size of the male breast. When I spoke to various doctors, they told me that nowadays many learned youths are attracted to hormonal treatment just to get that perfect solution of looking perfect, which is rarely possible.
Testing hormone levels in women’s saliva is nonscientific and almost useless.
Also, problematic is the use of growth hormones administered to increase the height of children. It is an understandable solution if a child’s growth hormone levels are low and he or she is stuck with an abnormally short stature. Even in such cases, height-increasing treatments can cost you huge. The usage of the same treatment in a child with regular growth is not clear and may be fraught with danger. A medical analysis of several studies on growth hormones that were reported in a leading medical journal stated that growth hormones did not increase exercise capacity. In fact, they made it worse. The claims regarding the performance enhancement properties of growth hormones are not supported by studies either. The manipulation of hormones to attain height, physical attractiveness, and performance will remain an eternal question.
Meanwhile, these days, we see gender confusions in society. Hormonal treatments are given as a part of the sex reassignment process that alters an individual’s brain chemistry, increasing the risk of depression in male-to-female transsexuals. The process aligns the transsexual’s risk of depression with the established risk of their desired gender.
The researchers and doctors have long known and documented the bodily effects of gender reassignment hormonal treatments. These hormones greatly alter the secondary sexual characteristics of the adult body, shifting a recipient’s physical appearance to that of the opposite sex. The changes occur involving hair growth and texture, voice, muscle tone, complexion, and overall body shape.
Individuals that undergo a sex change operation may have an increased risk of a depression as a result of the hormone treatments given during gender reassignment. You will not find these sex changed or patients undergone such treatments are really happy and problem-free. Rather they are encountering more physical and emotional problems after undergoing these treatments. The treatment might have given them the illusioned transformation, but it comes at a great invisible cost.
Transgender people using hormone treatment need lifelong medical support and care. In spite of lifelong spending and care, most of them either adopt to flesh trading or sex-starved businesses. Studies have shown that 90 per cent of these is suffering from HIV and STDs. So, where are these treatments ultimately leading them to?
Hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria resembles hormone replacement therapy for people with hypogonadism. Several guidelines are available at the start of hormonal treatments. Let it be a woman/man or transgender, they need to know the risk of overdoing of such treatments, and most importantly, from whom you are taking such treatments. These days, medical practice is business, the pure intent of the business is to make money out of your weakness and desires and most of the time the ailments that you go through, but nothing comes free. You have to spend your hard-earned money to get treated, my appeal is that don’t spend on buying danger. Identify the right medical practitioner and seek appropriate medication. What you want is a different thing and what you need is different.
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