By the time the picture changed, I had already done the reading. I’m a dermatologist. Hormones aren’t a side interest in that work — they’re central to it. Skin, collagen, barrier function, ageing: none of it makes sense without understanding what hormones do and how. So the foundation was there long before I had any personal reason to stand on it. I knew how to read the literature, how to be suspicious of a guideline, how to chase a claim back to the study it came from and check whether the study actually said what everyone insisted it did.
In the months before, I’d gone deeper than the day job required. I’d been working through hormone optimisation in detail — my wife’s panel and my own — the way I work through anything that matters: protocols, absorption, reference ranges, the difference between a number that’s technically in range and one that’s actually doing the work. I went further than I needed to, because precision is the part of this I find satisfying, and because when it’s for someone you love, good enough isn’t a setting you’re willing to leave it on.
I tell you this not to establish authority for its own sake, but because it changes how you should read everything else here.
When the realisation arrived, I didn’t have to go and learn what to do. I already knew. I knew which bloods to run and how to read them, what the targets were and why the standard ones often aren’t enough, which protocol fit and how to adjust it. The expertise I’d built pointing in an entirely different direction turned out to be exactly the toolkit I needed to understand my own body and act on it.
That’s the lens I bring to all of this. Not a patient who read some forums at 2am — though I was that too. A clinician who happened to be holding the manual when the question finally got asked.
Which means when I tell you something on this site, I’ve checked it. Against the evidence, not against what I hope is true.
