Opiates and Testosterone?
I was going to post this on the new forum, since it has to do w/MMT - but I think it may be more generally drawn to the topic of opiates and substance abuse. My fiancé has had a pretty much life long struggle with anxiety and depression -significantly worsening in his teens and peaking in early adulthood. He has gone through probably every single a/d and anti-anxiety med under the moon, and is currently taking Effexor w/consistently positive results. In the past, other a/ds have worked and after time sputtered out on him. He’s also had great success w/benzos, but his addictionologist is very reluctant to rx these now, due to his addictive tendencies (though he has never abused them - opiates were his DOC.) He also struggles with debilitating degenerative disk disease and it gets awful at times.
He's done the opiate merry go round, used and abused them all, and finally decided he wanted off for good. He tried long-acting morphine, an oxycontin regime, suboxone, finally settling on MMT - which has worked great until recently. His depression and anxiety has come out with a vengence. For almost months now he’s been completely out of sorts - no energy, lethargic, no desire to do anything but sleep (which he cannot do peacefully), low libido, emotional, afraid - all of it. He’s had past dx of bi-polar and GAD, but I’ve never seen him like this. It was kind of a fluke, but one doctor (after about 20 telling him this is all in his head) did a blood test which found extremely depleted testosterone levels - I’m not sure the unit of measure - but I believe for a man the average is something like 400-500, and even for a woman it’s 20 -100...his level was 14!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So they’ve given him this testosterone gel which he is to use daily - it absorbs through the skin. Dr says this could def be due to long-term use of opiates, especially methadone, and accounts for many if not all of his symptoms. He’s had the gel for 2 days now and felt an instant surge of ‘himself’ only side effects were a little agitation and anxiety and feeling 'weird.' I’m happy we’ve finally got some answers - but it almost seems too good to be true - this is the answer we’ve been searching for, for like 3 yrs??? I’ve done soooo much research on opiates and opiate addiction treatment for both of us....I've never came across this! I wonder if he should go to a specialist? He seems to think he’ll be fine now. Has anyone else heard of this, or been through it???