Quote from: sp2000 on September 06, 2015, 10:31:03 PM
I have been to so many drs and Endos. Have been on TRT but the problem is after sides, TRT does not work. It stopped its effects after few weeks. All I was getting was bloating and water in my body.I had to stop it.
Fluid retention is a sign that your estradiol (E2) levels are too high, which is a common side effect with TRT (especially injected T). With testosterone cypionate you shouldn't inject it at longer than weekly intervals, as the half life in your body is not much more than a week, so you end up with very large swings in your T levels, which tends to cause excessive E2 production when levels are at their peak, and leave you with T levels that are too low in the trough period. One way to get around that is to break up the dose into smaller, more frequent injections. I know some of the people on the hypogonadism forums I belong to inject it subq once every 3 days rather than IM weekly, so that the peaks and troughs are smaller and the level more stable. A common practice is to add in a low dose of HCG too, this has the effect of stimulating your testicles to resume hormone production, and seems to give a better overall result for a lot of people (probably because the testicles make several other hormones besides T, which aren't replaced by TRT).
Most of them take a low dose of arimidex (an aromatase inhibitor which blocks the T to E2 conversion) as well, as a way of holding down E2 levels. I myself use progesterone cream for that purpose (without it I get quite bad fluid retention in my legs and ankles). I don't know whether progesterone actually lowers E2, but it seems to have the effect of rebalancing my hormones away from estrogen, so the estrogenic side effects go away. What works in me might not work in someone who had 100 percent of their prenatal development occur as male though!
I've seen people saying that lab measurements for E2 in men often aren't very accurate (since it's ordinarily present in very low levels in males, making it difficult to measure). There's a special "sensitive" test you have to order, otherwise the results are basically meaningless.
If you're on any form of TRT, you should be aiming for total T in the 600 - 900 ng/dl range, anything less runs the risk of symptoms of hypogonadism returning. In the Framington Heart Study, the average total T in normal, healthy men aged 20 - 40 was 723.8 ng/dl. Doctors often try to tell their patients that levels considerably lower than that are "normal", but that's not what the science shows.
Although the active ingredient of saw palmetto isn't finasteride, it does the same thing as far as your body is concerned as finasteride (knocking out the enzyme 5-alpha reductase). Therefore it's possible you could have post-finasteride syndrome. Reading what you've said about bleeding and bruising though, have you had your liver function checked? I know cirrhosis of the liver is one of the things that can cause hypogonadism.
