How the protocol works

[LetsGo]

I’ve been wondering a lot lately and doing research. A lot of guys that come here are confused about how increasing testosterone can fix PFS. The protocol is obviously much more than just testosterone, but that’s a big part of it.

I might be behind the curve here, and some of this might be obvious to a lot of you but it helps me understand the point of this whole thing more and why you would want to put yourself into this lifestyle and process. I started wondering how you could possibly fix 5ar enzymes that are destroyed. But it would make sense that putting your body through a protocol like this, creates a need for your 5ar enzyme, and will eventually “kickstart it” in a sense. Like if your body starts producing a ton of test, it’s your going to effect your dht levels, which requires your 5ar enzyme, which is going to cause your body to find a way to heal them.Then once you kickstart that healing, your body is going to have tenfold the healing power to work with when you are giving it the proper tools it needs, also when you’re cleansed and it takes that energy away from fighting inflammation or leaky gut once that’s healed. That’s my understanding, or at least a theory.

But upon doing research I found that the amount of DHT in your body is reliant on how much natural testosterone your body is producing. When your levels of test rise, the more of it is converted into DHT. I’d imagine that would have a great effect on your 5ar enzyme, presumably in a positive manner since many men have recovered doing this.

So, if this post is obvious, sorry about that. But that little run down gave me more insight and a better understanding of how this works. At least part of it anyway. I honestly don’t know much about the role of DHT or 5ar in your body, I just decided to stick to TMO and I’ve been here ever since, finally getting around to actually learning what some of this shit means.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and this is a good question.

First, let’s talk about the 5 alpha-reductase enzymes. There are 3 versions of this enzyme that we know about, and finasteride (and dutasteride) don’t completely shut down all of them. On finasteride you’re still left with 30% of your 5ar. It is true that finasteride permanently destroys 5ar enzymes, and this is one of the major things that guys on PH freak out about. “Omg, it’s destroyed my enzymes permanently!”

Even under optimal conditions, your individual enzymes don’t last forever. It’s not like you’re born with a certain amount of 5ar enzymes that you keep for life, like it is with your bones, eyes, etc, that can’t regenerate. Your enzymes are like your blood, it’s continuously being destroyed and replaced. (Your red blood cells only live for 30 days, but that doesn’t mean you die of blood loss when you’re two weeks old, because your body has been making more blood in the meantime.)

Let’s say you have 100 units of 5ar enzymes, and you never took finasteride or anything like that. In 30 days, you will have 50 of those original 5ar enzymes left. In 60 days, 25 will be left. In 90 days, 12 will be left. 120 days, 6 will be left. 150 days, 3 will be left. In 180 days, 1 will be left. In 210 days, 0 will be left. But along the way, your body has been making new 5ar enzymes to replace the ones that are lost, holding it steady at 100 units the entire time. Finasteride knocks this down to 30 units, but after about 24 hours (finasteride has a half life of 5 hours, meaning it’s basically gone in 1 day,) the body starts trying to get back to 100 again, and over the next 6 months it should get back up to 100 again. This is why finasteride is not a one-time injection that works permanently.

It could be that finasteride somehow causes your body to think 30 units is the proper amount, even after finasteride is gone, but if that was the case then guys with PFS would not lose their hair. Most guys with PFS continue to lose their hair despite their PFS symptoms, which suggests that PFS is not caused by insufficient DHT / 5ar enzymes. Also, plenty of guys with PFS test normal or even elevated for DHT.

If PFS was just a function of not having enough 5ar enzymes, then it could be cured by injecting bioidentical 5ar enzymes into the blood. I don’t think a bioidentical artificial 5ar enzyme has been created, though. If it did exist, bodybuilders would use it to forcibly convert testosterone into DHT, and it’d also be worth testing as a potential PFS cure, but it doesn’t exist as far as I know.

In any event, nobody has scientifically proven how PFS works. (The PFS Foundation is trying to raise money to figure that out, but even if that is accomplished that doesn’t mean that a medical cure would be forthcoming any time soon.) Many speculate that somehow the body’s ability to make 5ar is compromised long-term, which is what you’re talking about, but that hasn’t been proven. Others speculate that it affects the quantity and/or functionality of the androgen receptors, or receptors or neurosteroids in the brain, and there are various other theories as well. It could be a combination of different things.

What I can tell you for sure is that there is far more to recovering from PFS than “increase testosterone” and/or “increase DHT.” It’s just a lot more complicated than that, and many doctors and self-cure seekers have tried diferent combinations of hormone affecting drugs, with no success. Whatever PFS is, no drugs are known to be able to reverse it.

The herbs that are a major part of the protocol - we don’t know how they work, either. The Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theories about che / life force, are all clearly uncientific bullshit. I’m not saying that TCM is bullshit, far from it, but the explanations of how it works are absolutely bullshit. The explanations were made up by guys thousands of years ago who had zero understanding of science, so they talked about things like “life force” (chi) that have no basis in reality. In fairness, science did not exist back then, so anything that doesn’t have an explanation, people would just make up a religious one, and that’s how it is with TCM and the “chi” explanations and so on. There absolutely is a scientific answer for how all of this works, but figuring that out would cost an enormous amount of money and take many years.

Anyway, we’re using herbs, which we don’t know how they work, to address a disease that we don’t know how it works. But… it gets results! People get cured! That’s the only thing that matters. That’s the ONLY aspect of this that you should care about. Even if we knew exactly how all of this worked, it wouldn’t change what we have to do.