I Buy Testosterone from a Sketchy Clinic and It Has Supercharged My Libido

Over the past decade, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) has exploded in popularity across the United States. TRT promises men relief from fatigue, anxiety, and low libido. But it’s not without risks. For starters, it has been linked to decreased fertility and blood clots. The FDA has only approved the treatment's use for men with low testosterone and an associated medical condition, like hypogonadism. In practice, though, testosterone is prescribed to a much wider swath of men by an increasingly broad range of providers.

It’s no longer just urologists and endocrinologists doling out prescriptions. Today, men can access highly potent formulations from direct-to-consumer sites like TRT Nation, or minimally credentialed practitioners at “men’s health clinics.”

For the latest installment in our series on The Secret Lives of Men, we talked to Robert*, a thirty-nine-year-old custom knife maker who decided to abandon his urologist’s conservative TRT treatment plan for a less orthodox approach. He’s happy with the results, even though he’s pretty sure the clinic he trusts with his care could be sued out of existence soon.

* Subject’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity.

I experienced my first panic attack in early 2023, a few months after I had left my job and started my own business. I was having intense nighttime anxiety every single night. I couldn’t sleep. I tried some homeopathic remedies. Nothing helped. I figured the panic attacks would go away once I got into the swing of working for myself but that didn’t happen. I would break down at night no matter what happened during the day. It felt completely irrational.

I didn’t want to go on anti-anxiety medication. I wasn’t interested in a quick fix. I didn’t want to go to therapy either. I wasn’t necessarily opposed to it. I just didn’t think it would resolve the issue. It’s not like I was bottling my feelings up inside. I talked to friends and family about my anxiety a lot. It didn’t make it go away. I wanted to solve the root issue.

I was also worried there might be something wrong with me physiologically, so I decided to go to a primary care doctor for the first time in my adult life. (The last time I saw one was when I was 17, more than 20 years ago). He ran some bloodwork. Everything looked fine, except for one thing: my testosterone was really low, like 70-year-old man low.

The doctor attributed it to fifteen years of an insane sleep schedule from my old job. I went to bed at 11 p.m. and woke up at 4 a.m., seven days a week, for over a decade. The lack of sleep had essentially shut my body’s natural testosterone production down. He referred me to a urologist, who put me on a low dose of bi-weekly testosterone injections right away. Within ten days of starting the injections, I gained 20 pounds and developed severe sleep apnea. My wife was the first one to notice. I was snoring like crazy and waking up gasping for air. Instead of feeling better, I felt worse.

The way my prescription was set up, my hormone levels would spike and crash really fast. It was a complete rollercoaster. I’d be on cloud nine for a few days then have a week-long unwinding period where I felt like shit again. I told my urologist about how bad I felt and he basically just shrugged his shoulders and suggested I go off testosterone entirely, which would mean having to endure a six-month period of zero testosterone production. He didn’t have any better answers for me. I’ve always been a “figure it out yourself” kind of guy, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I Googled “hormone replacement therapy clinic” and went to the first place that popped up. It’s basically a gray-market steroid factory. They’ll give you whatever you want so long as it's loosely related to the symptoms you tell them you have. The clinic itself is in a strip mall. It’s like a tacky medspa. Lots of candles and incense burning. The woman running it looks extremely … modified. She’s probably in her late forties, thin as a rail with big fake boobs, pouty injected lips, spray-tanned skin, and tons of makeup. She rolls up everyday in an Escalade wearing all kinds of jewelry. She’s definitely not a real doctor. Whatever the bare minimum qualification is to prescribe testosterone, that’s what she has. She’s running a money factory, more or less.

I had a lot of qualms at first. Obviously I knew it was sketchy. I started feeling a little better about the situation a few minutes into my initial appointment, after she ordered a full blood panel for me. They took like thirty vials of blood. Some of these direct-to-consumer, TRT companies don’t even require blood work. I honestly felt like I was being drained dry, but I appreciated how thorough she was.

When the results came back, she pointed out everything she felt like the regular doctors had missed. She said the protocol I’d been prescribed wasn’t working for my body. She switched me to a daily injection of a much lower dose of a faster-processing ester. She gave me about eight other medications too—an estrogen blocker, a diuretic, fenofibrate, finasteride, something for my thyroid. I researched everything she gave me and promptly threw most of it away. Half of it was snake oil, but the other half made me feel awesome.

I didn’t have any of the crappy side effects that my urologist’s protocol gave me. It doesn’t feel like I’m on a rollercoaster anymore. I feel the same every day. The panic attacks have stopped. I regularly sleep eight hours a night.

My libido, which had been non-existent for a decade, returned almost immediately. My sex drive was a chronic issue in my marriage. My wife would get upset and ask me if I was cheating on her. She thought I wasn’t attracted to her. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I just had zero feeling down there. I didn’t understand it myself. To find out that I had chronically low testosterone, that it was basically a chemical problem, that was huge.

Other things have gotten better too. My back and knee pain disappeared. I’m almost 40, and I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life.

I wouldn't have seen any of those benefits if I stuck with my urologist. He was content to let me quit cold turkey and suffer the consequences. Still, it’s not like the hormone clinic was my preferred choice. I felt like I had no other option. The traditional path just totally failed me.

This works better for now, but I’m not counting on the clinic staying open forever. Eventually the FDA is going to start shutting some of these places down. They’re basically the new pain clinics. Testosterone is like the new oxy. I don’t care if the clinic I go to gets shut down. I know what I need, and there are plenty of other unconventional ways to get it.

Some of my anxiety came back last summer. Not the panic attacks. Those disappeared once I got hormonally balanced. I really think the testosterone helped me carry the load of being a provider much better. But now my business is growing, and I feel like I’m dealing with natural anxiety from that. I went on a low-dose anti-anxiety medication a few months ago. You basically had to break my arm to get me to do it, but I feel much better. My worst days now are not anywhere near what my worst days used to be.