STOP Treating Low Testosterone As Depression: The 160 Reading Navy Doctor Refused | Tim Parlatore

**Tim Parlatore** (0:00)
Veterans will self-medicate through alcohol to deal with their PTSD. The reality is, is it because they were self-medicating for something that happened to them overseas that we failed to provide them proper treatment for?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:14)
There's just invisible wounds that these war fighters carry. Do you think that that also carries over or mental warfare?

**Tim Parlatore** (0:23)
The physiological effects of lack of sleep, regular concussive blasts, things like that, that's not just Special Operations, the infantry, it's the artillery. But every single one of these jobs involves high stress, sleep deprivation. It involves all of these risk factors.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:45)
Frequent brain trauma can then affect the brain. This subsequently downstream effect is having low testosterone.

**Tim Parlatore** (0:53)
Correct.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:53)
Is it safe to say that those on-the-ground combat with low testosterone going into war are going to be at a disadvantage?

**Tim Parlatore** (1:02)
The work that we put people through in a military career depresses their natural testosterone production, and we're not.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:18)
Tim Parlatore, welcome to the show.

**Tim Parlatore** (1:20)
Thank you.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:22)
I want to cover two major topics today. The first one is going to appeal to the science-driven individual, and basically everybody.
Of course, that is the memo that was issued from the Pentagon recently about screening war fighters, their testosterone, and then the second one is about you.

**Tim Parlatore** (1:49)
Okay.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:50)
And I've never heard you talk about yourself.

**Tim Parlatore** (1:52)
I haven't, really.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:53)
Well, we're going to change that today. Let's talk about this memo, dare I say now infamous memo, from the Pentagon.

**Tim Parlatore** (2:03)
Ah, yes, the testosterone memo. Um, so first of all, you know, I have a reserve duty as, you know, part-time Navy Reservist working as a Special Advisor for the Secretary.
And this is one of the things that, you know, that he and I do is we come up with ideas of how can we make things better for the force. And so the testosterone memo really came out of the work by Chris Frueh on operator syndrome. And we kind of, it was something both of us really cared about, is the idea that the work that we put these people through, and it's not just operators, it's across the force. The work that we put people through in a military career depresses their natural testosterone production, and we're not treating that. The military medical system is not treating it. And so, we had a few anecdotes, obviously, and then Chris' research, and so it was something that we kind of sat down and said, okay, what can we do here? How can we make this better?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:15)
Not just not treating guys with low testosterone, which we'll touch on, that's a real problem, because it increases risk of cardiovascular disease, bone fractures, but it also makes them non-deployable.

**Tim Parlatore** (3:31)
There was a lot of misconceptions around it, and part of the problem is that the way that the military community and the military medical community looked at it is they always viewed testosterone as a performance enhancing drug, and kind of put it into the same bucket with anabolic steroids. And so it's something that's been, to be frank, badly abused in certain communities where guys would be going to the gym and getting illegal steroids.
And it was something that I realized a couple of years ago from talking with one of my friends who was dealing with this situation and had been going and doing a bunch of anabolic steroids. And I kind of realized, you know, we talk about how veterans will self-medicate through alcohol to deal with their PTSD. But the reality is there's a lot of guys out there that are self-medicating with steroids to try to be able to keep up with the younger bucks. You get, whether it's, you know, veterans, but even guys on active duty, where you have, you know, the platoon chiefs and the senior enlisted that are trying to keep up with all the young kids in the platoon. And whether they know it or not, they are self-medicating for a depressed testosterone that, you know, 15, 20 years of working has done to them. And so the idea that instead of having them go out and do that illegally and unsafely, why don't we do that? And this is one of the big misconceptions. Nobody ever looked at this as an opportunity to take young, healthy people and give them an extra shot so that they can become, you know, bodybuilders with a gun.