Hegseth's Testosterone Plan: A Doctor Who Treats Veterans Responds | Dr. Mark Gordon

MEN TALKING MINDFULNESS - Dr. Mark Gordon: Testosterone & the Pentagon's TRT directive
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Speakers: Dr. Mark Gordon (guest), Jon Macaskill, Will Schneider

[0:03] Dr. Gordon: And the guys that have been in for 20 years, they've taken thousands of tablets. Right. And that thousand, those thousands of tablets have caused their testosterone insufficiency because of the mechanism has been attacked.

[0:19] Jon: But when I was in the military, I mean, we, we used it so often, we called it vitamin M, right yeah but

[0:28] Jon: for someone who has been on ibuprofen a majority of my adult life, for various reasons, what's the easiest thing that I can do to reverse this disruption?

[0:39] Dr. Gordon: So what reverses that is a mineral called selenium.

[0:45] Will: Oh, like in Brazilian nuts.

[0:47] Dr. Gordon: Selenium.

[0:47] Will: You know, so what, what can a listener do to kind of get control back now without like military grade blood panel?

[0:55] Dr. Gordon: The ideal thing is not to steal from the individual, their own ability to make their hormones.

[1:02] Dr. Gordon: We've now reversed, our 14th, case of MS.

[1:07] Will: Wow.

[1:07] Jon: Wow.

[1:09] Dr. Gordon: And one of them is a Navy Lieutenant who was in charge of the nuclear power plant on Nimitz carrier in 2020. retires. Tim retires. wake up to who you can be welcome to men talking mindfulness

[1:24] Jon: All right, Mark, we're just going to jump right in. In 30 to 60 seconds, what's the Reader's Digest version of why the average guy walking around today carrying significantly lower testosterone than his own grandfather had at the exact same age?

[1:44] Dr. Gordon: Short version is endocrine disrupting chemistry that we're exposed to every second in our foods, in our environment, in our air. These interrupt the ability of our brain to send the signal to our pituitary, which sends the signal to our gonads to turn on hormones in both males and females,

[2:02] Jon: period. There there you go. 30 to 60

[2:04] Will: seconds. Nice work. All right, everyone, that's Dr.

[2:06] Jon: Mark Gordon. He's been on our show several times already, and he's one of the pioneers connecting hormones and the brain. And he has spent decades on the link between TBI, traumatic brain injury, hormones, and the mental health. And a lot of that work has been done with veterans and operators whose bodies paid for the job. Today, we're going to cover the quiet war of male hormones, what's causing decrease in testosterone, the pentacons directive that wants to screen surface members over 30 and offer them TRT, and why Mark thinks that's the wrong target. If you've got a brain and a pulse and you're a man over 30, this episode is aimed right at you. A few quick asks before we dig in. Subscribe, like, comment, hit all those buttons. you know Send this to a buddy who needs it. And leave us a review because it really does help. It helps more than you know. And check out check out our new offering, Awareness to Action, course and community. It's 12 week modules that helps you to gain self mastery And you can check out our new offering awareness to action course and community it's 12 week modules that helps you to gain self mastery and you can check out check that out at awareness to action dot com And that's awareness the number two action dot com And then let's do our breathing exercise, our one breath grounding practice. Let's go ahead, get comfortable. And let's go ahead and exhale, really emptying out. And then a nice, long, slow, deep breath in through the nose. Holding full at All right. There we go. Will, my brother, good to see you. And Doc, always good to see you, my friend. I

[4:01] Will: know. Yes. uh Same here. Well, thanks for that little uh brief introduction. You said something very important, uh the endocrine system. Tell us what that is briefly and and and what how this helps the human body and what how this

[4:15] Dr. Gordon: helps the human body and its health. Well, the endocrine system is really two areas. One is below the neck, where we have all our glands, like testicles, ovaries, adrenal glands, thyroid gland, which generate hormones. Also, our liver, which generates a majority of our growth related hormones. But we've missed the fact that in the brain is the same chemistry that the rest of the body has, but uniquely in the cells of the brain, producing its own group of hormones, inclusive of testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, pregnenolone, the whole litany of 20 to 25 different hormones. So when we look at the deficiencies below the neck, it could be due to trauma, loss of testicles from blast trauma or from a cancer, or loss of ovaries from cancers or from trauma, rupture of the ovary, or loss of a kidney or adrenal gland that sits above the kidney and you lose a lot of the cortisol, the DHEA, and some of the other hormones that we really, really think about because we tend to focus on testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, growth hormone. There are another 21 more hormones that are as important, but they're not as popular. They're not as popular because testosterone sounds sexy. It sounds real sexy, man.

[5:38] Will: It's easy to target too. It's just like, oh, here's the one problem, which I feel is a big problem. The way we look at medicine these days and the body, it's just like we look at one thing, pick one thing apart and that becomes the enemy. And then we attack it with a bunch of science that isn't complete. Because then if you look at the endocrine system, it's an entire system correct. That requires, that has a lot of moving parts, a lot of different neurochemistry, a lot of different parts of the body that's plugged into. So thanks for that definition and helping us understand the endocrine system. And what, so what happens when, what are some of the major disruptors of the endocrine system?

[6:17] Dr. Gordon: Yeah, the brain is the CPU that regulates the hormones below the neck, as well as the brain has its own group of hormones that it helps to regulate. And that's the neuroendocrine system. And in the neuroendocrine system is where the hormones produced in the brain, which are identical to the ones produced below the neck, they regulate personality, cognition, neurotransmission, anti-inflammation, behavior, mood swings, sleep, anxiety, aggression. They all regulate different aspects. So when you have situations that disrupt the brain's ability to make these hormones called neurosteroids, to indicate that they're produced in the brain as opposed to those that are produced below the neck, you get disruption in very important pathways that help us to stabilize our emotions, our cognitive ability, and our functionality below the neck. The CPU is here.

[7:19] Will: Yeah. What are some of those major disruptors that, that, that you're aware of?

[7:25] Dr. Gordon: Yeah. Great, great question. There are so many disruptors that I've focused on two classifications. One is inflammatory and the other one is environmental. And the environmental can include things like medication that we take, not only the burn pit type of chemistry that comes off or the glyphosates from weeds, uh, defoliants, uh, or agent orange or PFSs or microplastics or any of the multitude of chemistry that we're exposed to in our daily living, not only in our environment, in what we breathe from the clouds that are being artificially generated by jets dropping crap into our air, but also the fact that there are chemicals that shouldn't be in our food that are illegal in all the other countries except the United States, but we're consuming it left and right. And over a period of time, they accumulate. And that accumulation leads to disruption of the neuroendocrine system. And that's really a key that no one's asking, why are we finding so many people with hormone deficiency? Oh, you're not exercising. You're eating too many fatty foods, too much fried foods. Yeah. They're contributory, but there are two main classifications that I believe in the past 31 years of just focusing in on this that are disrupting it. And that's inflammation, which can occur from anything, can occur from surgery, can occur from stress. So meditation helps to drop cortisol. Anything that increases cortisol will disrupt the brain. And it's a long story, which, you know, at the appropriate time, I'll share the story about cortisol interrupts some protective mechanisms in the brain leading to inflammation. And the other are, this is a classification of very, very commonly used medications over-the-counter and by prescription, which are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. What are they? Things like ibuprofen, Motrin, Naprocin, Feldeen, just a whole litany of medications that sit within that category. In the progression of this conversation, I'll use ibuprofen as the index or the representative of this classification of medications because it's the one that's being out there. Hundreds of millions of tablets being sold every year. Hundreds of billion, maybe. Plus the federal government does 77 million a year.

[10:02] Will: Wow.

[10:03] Jon: Definitely. Like, I mean, I still take ibuprofen regularly for inflammation, pain. But when I was in the military, I mean, we, we used it so often, we called it vitamin M,

[10:17] Dr. Gordon: right?

[10:17] Will: Yeah.

[10:18] Jon: For Motrin. Vitamin Motrin. If you have, if you have a problem, take some vitamin M. And they were not the, they were not the 200 milligram little things. They were the 800 milligram horse pills that we were taking. And some of us were taking two at a time. Um, and you know, that I, I, let's talk about that. And, and that's going to definitely tie into the, the Pentagon with the high T stuff or low T testing. But for someone who has been on ibuprofen a majority of my adult life, uh, for various reasons, what's the easiest thing that I could do to reverse this disruption?

[10:57] Dr. Gordon: Well, what has come out in literature in 2020 is that the damage, the toxic effect of ibuprofen and its sisters and brothers on the ability of the brain to send a signal to the pituitary to tell it to send out what's called luteinizing hormone, which is the key hormone that tells both in a female, her thecal glands to make her hormones and the ledig cells in the male's testicles to make testosterone is decreased by ibuprofen in the brain. So your signal is less. It's like having a radio, you're calling out to, you know, command post and, uh, you now have no power on your battery. So what you're sending out is really nothing that they can hear and respond to the same thing happens with the higher doses of, um, ibuprofen, which can take, according to some of the literature out there, seven days to start the problem. Okay. So what reverses that is a mineral called selenium.

[12:05] Will: Okay. Oh, like in Brazilian nuts.

[12:07] Dr. Gordon: Selenium. So Brazil nuts, 544 milligrams per five Brazil nuts. You need 400 milligrams a day for about eight weeks. Um, so what happened in 2017, August of 2017, an article came out from of all places, Denmark, talking about this research that had just completed where they showed the disruption in the brain's ability to make, uh, the signal gonadotropic releasing hormone to go to the pituitary to release luteinizing hormone. And they also found that the, uh, gonads had interruption of their ability to recognize the luteinizing hormone and send it to the nucleus to make the signal for making testosterone. You know, when I say making testosterone, it's not really accurate. What happens is a pathway, a cascade called steroidogenesis occurs where you go from cholesterol down a pathway that leads you to testosterone. And the next one is estradiol or the pathway that goes to cholesterol to the first hormone called the mother of all hormones, pregnenolone. And it's pregnenolone that goes down its different pathways to become estradiol, pregnenolone, DHA, cortisol, testosterone, DHT, DHEA. So what happens is those pathways are interrupted as well as the ability of the cells to recognize the signal that says make testosterone, take cholesterol, put it inside the mitochondria and spit it out as pregnenolone. And then all these enzymes throughout the body that help to metabolize it, convert it down the pathway leading to testosterone. You lose that. Wow. You lose that. And the literature talks about maybe seven days before it starts happening, but I haven't been able to find any literature that says how long until it recuperates, until it fixes itself. And the literature talks more about this toxic reaction that happens in the Leydig cells that make testosterone in men, the Leydig cells in females, and how it is transiently inhibited. Why transiently? If you fix it, you can fix it. And since 2018, my practice changed 100%. In 2017, read the article, read some additional articles. They were talking about babies in the uterus, the fetus, that mothers were taking ibuprofen, which is allowed, where they were having lack of testicular function when they're born. Oh, wow. They don't have the chemistry to indicate that, you know, they've had stimulation for the production of testicles. So there are a couple of articles out there that talk about that. So what happens is, if you're continuing to take ibuprofen or one of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, it would make sense to also take a cycle of selenium. And selenium methionine is the type that we use. It has a lot of benefits, anti-cancer, helps with thyroid function, helps with slowing down the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. So there's a number of additional benefits for guys and gals, males and females.

[15:34] Jon: So with all this in mind, right, the military is like giving out the vitamin M for any little pain that we have. And then now the HEGSETH is, he's got this directive that requires annual testosterone screening. And if that's for 30 and over, and if you're below 30, you can still take this. Sure. Um, and then you can get the, the TRT, um, and that's for active duty and reserve members. This is what you reached out to me about by email. And you know, you wanted to get this message out there. Why is this a bad idea?

[16:15] Dr. Gordon: It's a bad idea. Let's talk about the 30 years of age and older, because they've never asked asked or answered the question, why do they have low testosterone? And if we would look at the literature as well as what we've been doing since 2018, I don't use injectable testosterone anymore. What we do is we test them. We see the pattern of free testosterone to luteinizing hormone. And based on that, we will put them on to selenium and Clomid, Clomafin citrate. Clomafin citrate increases luteinizing hormone, which has been negatively affected because of the inflammation that the majority of our, the veterans that I see have, as well as the fact that they've been on 800 milligrams of ibuprofen one, two, three times a day for up to 11 months. We've been taking inventory since 2018 on every single one of our veterans and active military that comes into our program. And we look at the amount of, um, ibuprofen they've been on and how long they've been on it. And the guys that have been in for 20 years, they've taken thousands of tablets. Right. And that thousand, those thousands of tablets have caused their testosterone insufficiency because of the mechanism has been attacked. Right. So the point is we already know that the use of ibuprofen is ubiquitous throughout all branches of the military. And we haven't lined it up for each one of the branches to see who takes the most because that's not really the point, uh, the point they're taking it. And when I did a survey of the, um, the company that sells ibuprofen to the DOD for the VA in 2025, there were 77 million 800 milligram tablets purchased for the military. And that's only the 800s. I didn't look at the 600s or 400s or the 200s, which are the counter. Do you

[18:27] Will: have some numbers on that, Mark? You said you have almost 10 years of data, you know, talking, working with veterans since 2018. So where were their T levels and what would be a normal, normal T level? I mean, I know like obviously age is a factor here, but was there like a 30% or 20% or, or did you see anything significant?

[18:46] Dr. Gordon: Um, let's put it this way. They were all in the first or second quartile, which are the lowest levels of testosterone. Uh, if you saw the video or the read the article that I wrote on the fallacy of clinical laboratory, normal ranges where the ranges that are used are irrelevant to health. They're relative to a population-based statistics. So when you look at the laboratory results or when a doctor looks at the laboratory results, they're not looking at it from a spectrum of what's healthy and what's not healthy. They're looking at it as a statistical assessment of the population that was used to quantify the level. So the 31 years that I've spent, or the 20 years that I've spent looking at these levels relative to optimal health, optimal health is between the 50th and 75th percentile of the laboratory range. And this is how we've gotten 78.3% of our veterans in active military better in a year's time is because we're not accepting, let's say hormone range is, uh, a hundred to 900 and they come in at 101. What does the doctor say? And the patient says, uh, the vet says, but doc, I don't feel good. And the doc responds as well, you must be depressed here. I have the SSRI. And it's that common scenario that I've listened to and heard from those that come into the practice. So a few things need to be changed is looking at what optimal performance is what level of this hormone or that hormone or this chemistry provides an optimal level of performance to the operator, the individual. That's the key because down at 101, they're suffering because that's insufficiency, not sufficiency. And that's what we need to be looking for is sufficiency, optimal function.

[20:56] Jon: What is Hegseth's idea behind this is that, is that we increase testosterone across the service that we're going to have more lethal warriors. Is that, I mean, is that the idea there? Is that,

[21:10] Dr. Gordon: I really don't know what, what it is other than if you look at the, uh, government's correlations between low testosterone and functionality. There's a direct, there's an inverse, uh, relationship, the higher, the better, or direct

[21:28] Jon: relationship, or the

[21:29] Dr. Gordon: worst, higher, the better. So, you know, you want readiness is what he talks about. And

[21:35] Jon: I'm

[21:36] Dr. Gordon: behind that, but we can't do it at the risk of creating infertility.

[21:43] Jon: That's where I was going to go next is, is the Clomid. Clomid, right? Like Clomid is given to people with low T if fertility is still something that they want. Whereas injectable TRT, that basically makes you infertile, right?

[22:01] Dr. Gordon: It can. It can. It can. It can. We've had a number of cases where, um, like 43-year-old, uh, vet who between the age of 33 and 38 was on 200 milligrams of testosterone cypionate every Sunday and he retired.

[22:18] Jon: 200 milligrams.

[22:20] Dr. Gordon: Yeah. Which is, you know how much, uh, a healthy 25 to 35 year old male makes a day? Four to 10 milligrams a day, 28 to 70 milligrams a week. So when we start seeing people on 200 milligrams a week as one shot, as opposed to spreading it out, you know, you run the risk. Our bodies are built in such a way that if the body perceives something is excessive, it'll try to get rid of it. So if your testosterone is very high, it will try to get rid of it through two pathways, dihydrotestosterone, DHT, and the other pathway is estradiol. So if your estradiol goes up, they give you aromatase inhibitor, which is a poison in and of itself. And as opposed to just lowering the testosterone, that's simplistic. So going back to, you know, optimal performance, uh, we know there's depression. We know there's cognitive impairment. We know there's problems with libido, but you know that in the wrong person, testosterone will cause libido to drop really through a chemical called adenyl cyclase. And it's a paper that I'm in the middle of because everybody comes, Oh, my libido is bad. Their testosterone levels are great. My libido is bad. Well, for them, their testosterone being great might be too much for their system. Also testosterone, free testosterone can cause panic attacks, agitation, aggression. And we don't even talk about that. So it's not as, as simplistic of approach just to give someone with a testosterone deficiency, replenishment, testosterone. I would rather that they try to stimulate their own, the individual's body back up by giving them selenium and, um, clomiphant citrate or enclomid. And this is what we've been doing since 2014. And we've had great responses. Um, a major out of Fort Hood was on eight medications and, uh, uh, Andrew Marr and I met him, uh, at the, uh, capital in Austin, when we showed the movie, quiet explosions. And he asked the question at the end and he was on the verge of tears saying, how come I didn't know about this movie? How come I didn't know about the millennium protocol and so forth? So Andrew and I ended up bringing him into the program and he was on eight medications. Six months later, he's off all his medication and he stops our protocol. When he came into us, his testosterone level was under four free testosterone, total testosterone is worthless. Free testosterone is the key. A year after he stopped his, uh, protocol with us, we measured his testosterone. It was 13. Wow. We had restarted his system. That's what Clomid can do because if inflammation is causing your brain not to be able to produce the signals for making luteinizing hormone and if they've been on ibuprofen, that's a double whammy. It's two aspects that have damaged astrocytes and the hypothalamus. So it can't generate the signal. So we were able to reverse his problems and drop his inflammation. And as you might know, we have a new laboratory test which measures inflammation partially in the brain, the rest of the body, and we can actually monitor our treatment and how well it's working by how it drops inflammation. And that inflammation is directly related to their improvement.

[26:04] Jon: With the increase in testosterone, isn't there also the danger of your hematocrit getting too high, your blood thickening and potentially throwing a clot? Yeah. Does that happen with, with Clomid as well? No. Yes, I know. Okay. It does not

[26:19] Dr. Gordon: happen with Clomid. Let's put it this way. It can happen with anything, potentially could happen with anything that raises the, um, testosterone dihydrotestosterone level, which stimulates the bone marrow to release erythropoietin, which causes more cells to be, uh, produced. I see it very rarely because we pulse it. We pulse our Clomid. We don't give it every day. We start off at every 72 hours, 50 milligrams every 72 hours.

[26:51] Jon: I was on your, uh, I'm still on, on most of your protocol and, and that's what I'm doing.

[26:57] Dr. Gordon: Well, we, this is what we have over a thousand people actively on it at any one time. And what we do have are people who graduate from the program and then we monitor them for six months to a year to see if they stabilize their testosterone production. Remember, it is a transient insult with ibuprofen and a transient insult with inflammation. Inflammation in the brain will shut down our ability to make our neurosteroids, our hormones in our brain. And we've known this for a long time. It also interrupts neurotransmitters. It also is a potential cause for making psychedelic assisted therapies like ibogaine, ayahuasca, psilocybin. It might make them not work as well. I had a, um, uh, F-18 pilot who worked in, um, Mexico, uh, in these clinics where they did ibogaine and, uh, DMT. And he had gone through a number of, uh, sessions himself. And he calls me and he tells me this story. I said, so why are you calling me? You've got the best of the best. He said, I don't feel where I need to feel. I don't feel as good as I should. I said, okay. So we ran his testing. He had neurosteroid deficiencies. He had inflammation, started him on treatment. Two weeks after being on our protocol, he calls up and says, I'm a hundred percent now. So an article that was published in, um, 2023 is about how inflammation, uh, decreases the effectiveness of psychedelic assisted therapy. I have a new article coming out. I'll be doing it with, um, Adam Marr. This article about, uh, it's a little bit heavier than the first one. The first one's on psychedelic, uh, spotlight published in, uh, 2023. It's on my website and it's on their website as well. And it explains in very straightforward terms that if you do not have the optimal chemistry of the brain, how do you expect something as important as the molecular structure or the chemistry behind a psychedelic assisted therapeutic agent to function? Because it's not going to find the receptors. It's not going to find the supportive biochemistry or neurochemistry of the brain. So you'll have a diminished amount. There's a doctor in, uh, who was originally in Jamaica, uh, Nick Murray's a Canadian doctor who opened up a psychedelic assisted therapy center in Jamaica for, uh, NFL and for American veterans. And he was doing very well. He calls me out of the blue and he says, you know, every one of the patients we see from you do much better than the people who come into us cold. And that's because they already had correction of their neurochemistry, not a hundred percent necessarily, but a correction in the right direction. They did much better. What happened with Nick is, um, Richard Branson called him and said, look, you got to get out of Jamaica. So he offered him a position, uh, a house and a facility on, uh, in the Virgin Islands. So that's where Nick is. So it's just really cool. But, um, you know, we, we need to broaden our understanding of how to optimize treatments, whether or not it's psychedelic assisted therapy or hormonal replenishment. The ideal thing is not to steal from the individual, their own ability to make their hormones. And that's why giving them testosterone will do that because it suppresses their own system. Go

[30:50] Will: ahead. No, well, you talked about, you know, the brain, we're kind of tapping into what we want to get to next here is the brain zone pharmacy. You know, you mentioned, you know, steroidoneurogenic or steroidogenesis and, uh, neurosteroidogenesis. Help us understand that, like, you know, in a kind of a freshman level, you already kind of talked about, uh, glutenizing hormone, I think is kind of the mother of a lot of these hormones. And, uh, and then we can kind of get deeper into, um, you know, how this is just the disruption of this pharmacy that this wonderful pharmacy, our body actually, uh, by being an operator, um, you know, creates all these downstream effects of like low testosterone and other problems. Right. Well,

[31:29] Dr. Gordon: as I already stated, inflammation drops the ability of the hypothalamus to make the signal that tells the pituitary to make luteinizing hormone, uh, inflammation, ibuprofen does that chronic stress does that. So just no physical trauma, just stress because cortisol goes up. Cortisol shuts off a neuron's production of a chemical called fractalkin. Fractalkin keeps everything balanced in the brain anti-inflammation. It suppresses the cells called microglia and the microglia are responsible for, uh, immune defense. So they're the ones that dump the pro-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6, IL-6, IL-1, IL-1-beta, tumor necrosis factor alpha. So when you're under stress, cortisol goes up, fractalkin goes down and these cells become activated. They go from a sedentary called M0 to an activated M1. And that's where they start dumping all these chemicals that interrupt the ability of the hypothalamus to produce its signal. Okay. And again, that signal all goes to the interpituitary and is luteinizing hormone. So how luteinizing hormone works is it's the trigger that causes cholesterol to go into the mitochondria and to get converted to pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is the first step in our steroidogenesis. So without pregnenolone, you can't make all the other

[33:10] Will: steroidal

[33:10] Dr. Gordon: hormones. Okay. So the key is luteinizing hormone. What else will cause luteinizing hormone not to be produced? Testosterone. Injections of

[33:20] Will: testosterone. There you go.

[33:21] Dr. Gordon: Shuts that off. Wow. Estradiol shuts that off because estradiol and testosterone are the estradiol over testosterone easiest to get into the brain. So when you take a tablet, you take an injection, you put a cream on of estrogen or testosterone, goes right into the brain. And it influences the mechanisms, the biochemistry, the neurochemistry of the brain. So you lose the production of 20 plus hormones in the brain. And you need every single one because, as you said, Will, the pharmacy of the brain are the, aside from the neurotransmitters and all the supportive chemicals, the dopamine, serotonins, and so forth, are the neurosteroids. Each single one has a function. And because of our discussion yesterday, Will, I put a paper together, which I think I might've sent you, and it's on my website, and it's also on Instagram, which explains every single one of the hormones that are called neurosteroids and how they function to regulate the quality of our brain's health. And every time we do silly things like inject ourselves with testosterone, we shut it off. Wow. Estradiol, shut it off. Mm-hmm. So instead of giving us things like testosterone that have a predictable negative effect on the brain's pharmacy, would it be better to give a medication like Clomid or Enclomid that actually increases the production of luteinizing hormone so you can make your own? Clomid-Enclomid is not gonadotropic releasing hormone. It is not testosterone and estrogen. It is not luteinizing hormone. It is not follicle stimulating hormone. It tricks the body, the brain, into signaling for more luteinizing hormone. And one of the diagnostic challenges for the majority of doctors is that we were trained, I was inclusive of this group, so I'm not pointing a finger at them being worse than me or me being worse than them, which is the same thing. Anyway, the point being that the pattern that we see is called primary hypogonadism. That is when luteinizing hormone is elevated and testosterone production is low. That is a classical finding in people with ibuprofen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory use. Why? Because the testicles aren't allowed to recognize luteinizing hormone. So the body sends a feedback and says, "Make more luteinizing hormone." So luteinizing goes up, up, up, up, up, trying to get the testicles to respond, but they can't respond because there is a wall around them. And that wall is this toxicity produced by the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. So we need to break that wall down so that the leitig cells, the cells that have the receptors on it for luteinizing hormone, can receive the receptor, go into the nucleus, and turn on steroidogenesis that leads to testosterone. And on the way, you get pregnenolone, progesterone, allopregnenolone, DHEA, DHEAS. You get all these other very important hormones, which otherwise you lose when you put yourself on injectable testosterone. And the other issue is, you now commit a 30-year-old, let's say 35-year-old, to the rest of their life, you know, what's the average, 84 or whatever, to the rest of their life on testosterone. What happens if testosterone disappears? What happens is it's no longer available or something crazy happens. It's like in 2022, our availability of testosterone from a major center in Texas, empowered pharmacy, couldn't get it. And I called up number two, who happens to be a veteran. I've known him for a while. And I said, "What's going on?" He said, "Because of who they are, they're a federally registered compounding manufacturer." There's only like 14 of them in the United States. They said that they were told by the government at that time that they needed to make the testosterone available for those people going through transition and not to make it available to people who were just trying to live life. And I said, "You've got to be kidding." He said, "No."

[38:10] Jon: Um, I want to come back to the brain and what, you know, the brain's own pharmacy, like Will said. And then, and then I want to ask a question about pain. Um, if a service member, if a military service member does have a brain injury, are there ever scenarios where the blood testosterone will actually register as normal while the brain hormone production is devastated? And if that is in fact possible, why would an injection never reach that problem?

[38:42] Dr. Gordon: Okay. Well, the way that you can actually determine if that's happening is because if you do your initial laboratory work with luteinizing hormone and testosterone, let's take someone that doesn't have an issue with inflammation or with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. So if you measure their blood, luteinizing hormone is elevated and low and testosterone is low, it means that they're not making adequate amount of testosterone. So when you give them testosterone, artificially give them testosterone, the luteinizing hormone will drop. And where is that being measured and metered? In the brain, in the hypothalamus. So you will know that it's getting into the brain by this pattern change. In order to have luteinizing hormone go up, you have to have deficiency of testosterone or a tumor. And in order for a luteinizing hormone to go down, you need to have adequate amount of testosterone or you've got damage to the anterior pituitary in battle-hardened individuals where they've been exposed to scuds and mortars and IEDs and repetitive gunfire. They might have trauma to the anterior pituitary. And it's not as common to have a singular deficiency, meaning that the hormones produced in the pituitary, you know, like thyroid stimulating hormone, acetyl ACTH, luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, growth hormone, and so forth, usually see patterns of deficiency, which will relate to trauma to the pituitary blood supply or the stock or the regulatory system in the hypothalamus. You can see that that pattern. So if you're giving them adequate amount of testosterone, which gets rapidly passes into the blood, estrogen, estradiol, and testosterone rapidly get into the brain through peripheral testosterone and estrogen. So those injections you give subcutaneously or deep intramuscularly, within three hours they get into the blood and they go on right into the brain. And over a period of time, you'll see the luteinizing hormone drop. So that's a great indication that it is getting in there. If you give testosterone and it doesn't suppress, then I would do an MRI with contrast to see if they have a pituitary abnorma, which is a tumor that's producing luteinizing hormone. So it might be a tip off from that.

[41:28] Jon: Wow. Yeah. And then coming back to the The ibuprofen and the NSAIDs wall that you mentioned, that's kind of there no matter what, if we're taking these. I mean, our, our service members, when they're downrange or when they're training, there are things that are going to cause pain. They're going to cause inflammation. Well, um, you know, there's not a whole lot of

[41:56] Will: safe medication.

[41:57] Jon: I mean, taking,

[41:58] Dr. Gordon: uh, tramadol or Tallwin or, you know, naloxone or something else instead of, uh, opioid. Um, um, you know, you can't do that when you need your, your mental capacity. So it's looking at the spectrum, it's the least of the evils. And it's something that we now know we can reverse the damaging effect. So that's, that's a, a bit of a good, good issue. There is a chemical, uh, called peroxynitrite that's produced in the brain due to inflammation and, um, it can cause, uh, pain, uh, neuropathic pain. In fact, it's a presentation I did for Walter Reed and, uh, Georgetown in, uh, 2023 or four, February 24. And, uh, it is generated by inflammation in the brain. So it'll give you a accentuated, uh, exaggerated, um, pain perception where you might not have any. And we've had guys that should not have any pain, but they're having pain and it's because of this peroxynitrite. And when you drop their inflammatory load or their inflammatory stress, um, what happens is their pain levels drop and it could be, uh, causative for insomnia as well. From free radicals, uh, from, uh, superoxide, uh, radical, uh, reactive oxygen species can generate it.

[43:38] Will: You know, so people listen to this, men listening to this, like we talked about some ways to kind of like combat, you know, this low testosterone. Um, you know, so what, what can a listener do to, to kind of get control back now without like military grade blood panel?

[43:56] Dr. Gordon: Right. Well, I, I think that anyone who's listening to this, who doesn't want to be committed to testosterone for the sexy nature of being on testosterone, I think, uh, getting a luteinizing hormone and a free testosterone. And of course, estradiol, DHT, pregnenolone, and some of the other laboratory tests that I talk about on my website, you can read the 28 point biomarker panel, which gives you what we do with all our veterans, uh, how we test to get a panel run and then to look at the panel, look at the pattern. And based on that pattern to try for six months, getting on to, uh, either enclamid or, um, clomiphene citrate. Now we use clomiphene citrate. We rarely have anybody develop any problems, ocular problems, cognitive problems, or mood related problems. I think we have maybe six people that have developed, uh, a side effect, quote unquote, don't know if it's real or not. And, um, the majority of people, the reason why they don't get a problem is because we don't give it every day. We pulse it. And when you pulse it, what happens is every 72 hours, when you pulse it, you don't build up a level that will possibly create side effects. And also the receptors, which is what I'm, uh, in the world of peptides, which I see a lot of problems is people are on the same peptide for a long period of time without taking a hiatus or a break and their body stops recognizing it. So you lose it. It's called tachyphylaxis. The receptors diminish. Instead of having a lot of receptors, the body says, Hey, this guy is on abusive levels of these peptides, these hormones, these chemicals, let's shut down before we get hurt. So that's what happens. It shuts itself down. So a trial for at least six months on the, uh, Clomid, uh, every 72 hours at three months, get a follow-up test to see where they're at. At the three months is when we usually regulate up or down. We have, uh, about a half dozen veterans who are on one Clomid a week. Their body responds so very well to it and their testosterone levels are far above what injectable will give you reasonable dosing of, uh, of injectable testosterone.

[46:27] Will: Yeah. And Clomid is, uh, that's prescribed. Is that, uh, it's a prescription.

[46:32] Dr. Gordon: It's a prescription. Um, the, the project that we have, um, Clomid out there is anywhere between, oh, 400, $600 for a six month supply. Uh, our veterans, uh, pay $75 for a six month supply. We take care of the

[46:50] Will: rest. And that, in that six months, what would they, what kind of, uh, increase in testosterone and overall health would they see?

[46:57] Dr. Gordon: What we're seeing is at least 50% or above. Why? Our entire program, if you're not 50 to 75 percentile of the range, then we need to improve your dosing. In the past 20 years, I just gave a lecture on this. And in the past 20 years, what we found was the 50th to 75th percentile is where we get the highest amount of response. The 75 to a hundred percent is where we put our Alzheimer's patients, our Parkinson's, our CTE, our MS patients. We've now reversed, uh, our 14th, uh, case of MS.

[47:36] Will: Wow.

[47:36] Jon: Wow.

[47:38] Dr. Gordon: And one of them is a Navy Lieutenant who was in charge of the nuclear power plant on Nimitz carrier in 2020. He retires. Tim retires. Subsequently, he loses vision in his left eye, loses

[47:50] Will: functions, right

[47:51] Dr. Gordon: hand, right leg, hallucinating emotional volatility and the cognitive impairment. And he, um, goes to the VA, he's in Florida and they diagnose him with MS and they offer him treatment. He's smart kid. He read, he saw that potential of the treatment killing him faster than the illness. So he's, he's leaving, um, the VA and he gets into his car to drive home and he turns on his, uh, talk show for the day, which was Joe Rogan. No way. Let's let second that I'm talking about a Navy seal by the name of Nathan, who is 50% better in 60 days on our protocol. Now, from when Nathan was on board to when Tim's on board, major improvement in our technology. So what happened with Tim is in 14, uh, 12 weeks, he was 90% better. And we've gave him one peptide at 14 weeks, 100% remission. And he, that was November 23. He's still in remission.

[48:57] Will: Wow. Excellent. Wow. Yeah.

[49:00] Dr. Gordon: So this is inflammatory. It

[49:02] Will: really works. You gotta, you gotta work with the body instead of just like trying to do something that doesn't actually work. And it's proven. Yeah. Well, yeah.

[49:11] Dr. Gordon: Yeah. It's like you, you're driving your car and it

[49:14] Will: stops. Yeah. It just stops. Yeah.

[49:16] Dr. Gordon: You check water in the radiator. It's good. You check the brake fluid. It's good. You check the transmission fluid. I can't call it training fluid anymore. Right. Maybe you can. Uh, true.

[49:27] Will: Depends on the car.

[49:28] Dr. Gordon: True. And no one stops to say, Hey,

[49:31] Will: gasoline. Right. Right.

[49:34] Dr. Gordon: They're missing something. So it's the gasoline. So we always need to put the fuel back into the system.

[49:39] Will: That's a great way to describe it.

[49:40] Dr. Gordon: And it's not just our nutrition. It's these hormones. And each one of these hormones, as you'll read in the paper, if you haven't read it yet, each one of them has a benefit towards dropping inflammation.

[49:52] Will: Testosterone is the best. Yeah. And that's

[49:54] Dr. Gordon: drops or the inflammatory, uh, pro-inflammatory cytokines and stimulates the most important, um, anti-inflammatory in

[50:04] Will: inflammation is one of the biggest problems that we're experiencing in the body right now. A hundred percent. Right. Yeah.

[50:08] Jon: Correct. Coming back to Hexeth, you know, if, if, if you had an opportunity to sit in front of secretary Hexeth for two minutes, um, and you wanted to tell him, Hey, look, this is a better route. What would you say to the, to help solve this problem?

[50:24] Dr. Gordon: Well, I would show him the over 5,000 veterans that we've taken care of. We're self-funded. We helped fund them. And to give me a trial, I'll pay for it all. And to prove it

[50:38] Jon: to him. Wow.

[50:38] Will: What would the steps be? What would you, I mean, you mentioned getting her in Motrin and that kind of, kind of thing. What would, what would, what

[50:44] Dr. Gordon: would be history? Of course, like we do on every one of our, uh, patients, we have unfortunately 23 pages of questionnaires. And, um, we find out what their history was for exposure for trauma and their use of ibuprofen or one of the other non-steroidal. We draw the blood and based on the blood, it dictates to us how to treat. And then we treat them. And, uh, every month they fill out what's called a monthly program questionnaire, which gives us an understanding of how well they're doing. At three months, we look at their, um, testosterone luteinizing hormone level. Sometimes what happens at three months, it better discloses the pattern. It might be a questionable pattern at the beginning, but their history says, says, yes, we got to go ahead with selenium and, um, and, uh, clomiphant or e-clomid. And then, uh, at the end of six months, um, to one year to take a, you know, put a paper together, looking at the outcomes. I mean, I'm doing that right now for the state of Florida. We got a, um, Sergeant Fox grant to take care of 50, uh, Floridian veterans on our protocol, which includes the, uh, inflammatory blood panel, inflammatory marker by iExpress genes out of Huntsville, Alabama. It's a test that I've waited 29 years for because it's a very inexpensive, throw it on your shoulder, punch the button in the middle. It draws your blood, send it to the lab. A week later, I see the pattern of inflammatory markers in the brain and in the

[52:24] Will: general circulation. Someone might say, well, that sounds really expensive, Dr. Gordon. Like, is it?

[52:29] Dr. Gordon: No, the, um, 20 point panel is under $500. Okay. And, uh, you know, we pay for our veterans to get it done. Um,

[52:42] Will: yeah. Okay. So it's, it's affordable. Wow. And, and the outcomes, it sounds like you're going to be, you're going to create more battle ready fighters for sure.

[52:50] Dr. Gordon: Correct. And it has targeted, you know, it gives us our target as well as it gives us our monitoring. So if our treatment is working, what do you expect to see 90 to 120 days later? A drop.

[53:02] Will: Wow. Excellent.

[53:05] Dr. Gordon: And we've seen that. We've seen major drops in, uh,

[53:08] Will: inflammatory

[53:09] Dr. Gordon: markers and what correlates with that improvement in their state world. Right.

[53:14] Will: There it is.

[53:16] Jon: Yeah. So that matters not just on the battlefield. It matters off the battlefield too. With it, with the, or,

[53:22] Dr. Gordon: uh, my daughter, Allison is, uh, thanks for NFL and, uh, uh, professional sports and getting them to do the exact same thing that I'm doing with our veterans. And we're seeing their pre CTE levels of inflammation. Remember CTE is an accumulation of chronic inflammation that no one's done

[53:44] Will: anything for.

[53:45] Dr. Gordon: Yeah. And one of the side effects is we see a lot of our neuropsychiatric conditions improve as well. It's a paper that's out there on, uh, neuroinflammation, the road to neuropsychiatric illnesses, uh, talks about that.

[53:59] Jon: Thank you so much, doc. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure having you on the show and, uh, thank you for educating us. And yeah, we hope that this does get before Pete Hexeth and, uh, and yeah, we'll, we'll hope to change the, the way of the military and, and, uh, and, uh, and, and a lot of others lives with this information that you've shared with us.

[54:18] Dr. Gordon: Hopeful. That would be nice

[54:19] Jon: because a

[54:20] Dr. Gordon: lot of people from sticking a needle in themselves and you might be able to

[54:25] Jon: turn this

[54:26] Will: back on in six months. And in a healthy way, in a healthy way, activate the body. We have such like an amazing body and I don't know why, you know, uh, you know, all this big industry and the military doesn't really want to honor like what it really, what is already on the inside of this incredible human being, you know, that we are. And, uh, hopefully this message gets out to more people and people, people start doing something about it. I appreciate the help. Yeah, of course, Mark. Uh, it's, I appreciate what you're, the work you're putting out there and it's great having you on the show. You're you're only like a very, uh, you know, uh, short, small class of, of guests. I think they're in the number three now

[55:01] Jon: that have been three, three or four times.

[55:02] Will: Uh, thank you, Dr. Mark. Great to have you on the show. Uh, and, um, you know, we'll have you

[55:07] Dr. Gordon: back again

[55:07] Will: to discuss maybe what's coming down the pike next. So thank you, sir.