Clinician McCall McPherson covers testosterone replacement for thyroid disease patients. She walks through options: adrenal support, topical creams, injections, pellets. For women, she targets 35-65 ng/dL normally, sometimes up to 120-140 ng/dL, and warns that pellets and high doses risk hair loss and other side effects.
Questions this video answers
About 35 to 65 (total testosterone).
Conservatively up to approximately 120–140 (total testosterone).
Around 1000–1100 (total testosterone).
About 800–900 (total testosterone).
She reports women with total testosterone over 800, over 1200, and over 2000.
Chapters
When I posted about low testosterone in my thyroid patients and how common it is, you guys had the question, how do I fix it? So obviously I wanted to do a post to answer that question. You know, if you want to try to do it naturally on your own, the best way is to support your adrenals, allowing you to have sufficient DHEA production, which is actually an upstream hormone from testosterone that when you have enough, it can dump into testosterone. The way that I often do it with my patients, just to get a quicker bang for their buck, is actually give them some testosterone. There's a lot of ways that you can do this. Cream I often use like a sublingual tablet that dissolves under their tongue and then there's pellets, you know, and then obviously injections. But for women those are a little bit less common. The important thing for me is to not overdo it. Women don't need a ton of testosterone, they kind of just need enough. I mean, my optimal, physiologically normal range, meaning if I want to start someone conservatively, I put them where they should be naturally in an optimal manner. And that is a total testosterone value of about 35 to 65. Conservatively, I'll increase my patients up to like 120, 130, 140. That sounds like a lot in the world of testosterone replacement. Totally not a lot. Gives them a robust level, allows them to function, improve their sex drive, their energy, their workouts, their muscle mass, all the things, but not the increased health risk or side effects and that kind of thing. I could probably get some heat for this, but I'm not a huge advocate for pellet therapy, mainly because I kind of see it used and abused a lot. I see. You know, to give you a perspective, a robust testosterone level for a 25 year old man is like a thousand eleven hundred. 8, 900 is great. I have had women transfer to my care with a testosterone over 800, another woman over 1200 and another woman over 2000. That's double what a man should have. And that's just. Honestly, it's terrifying to me. And once that little pellet gets placed into your buttock, obviously you can't take it out. So I just find most of the time women are overdosed in that form. So I don't use it off. I don't recommend it often. Occasionally I will to specific clinics and clinicians that I trust. So I hope that helps. I feel that, you know, if testosterone replacement is used conservatively and in a smart way, it is a high, high reward with very low risk, so I hope that helps. A couple of you commented about hair loss on testosterone. You know you might want to take like Nutrafol is a great supplement for that because it's got some things that block the byproduct of testosterone that can increase hair loss. But most often I would say that that's absolutely due to you being over medicated. So hope that's helpful. You guys like and Comment Share Save Follow me. You know all those TikTok things for more content.
