The Pentagon’s Roid-Fueled Craze Was Cut Off After Only One Day

The Pentagon’s new testosterone screening program was rescinded in a single day, as the Department of War moves to update the program.

The initial plan involved “mandatory screening for testosterone deficiency” for any male service members over 30 years old, according to a statement from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell on July 15. Testosterone Replacement Therapy can have serious side effects for patients, while some individuals may genuinely need the care, multiple medical experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“When I heard this plan, I said, ‘Well, what, what the fuck? What is he doing?'” Dirk Vanderschueren, an andrologist at UZ Leuven and KU Leuven in Belgium, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Of course, there’s some deficiency as such, and I’m talking as an andrologist; as you know, a lot of patients have a very rare disorder. It happens, but it’s very rare.” 

“The issue of treating men with low testosterone is that you can exacerbate infertility,” Martin Miner, co-director of the Brown University Men’s Health Center, told the DCNF. “That’s probably the most significant side effect … and that’s an issue, of course, with younger men because we want to preserve their fertility.”

One high-profile instance of this side effect is allegedly seen in online personality Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular. Clavicular has publicly said his use of testosterone and anabolic steroids left him infertile, Vox reported.

However, not all experts interviewed by the DCNF were critical of the Department of War’s (DOW) proposed testosterone screening program.

“I will say that for the administration to do a screening test for men entering the military, I think this is a good thing because it’ll pick up those patients who or people who would probably need supplementation,” Wayne Hellstrom, professor of urology and chief of andrology at Tulane University School of Medicine, told DCNF. “It’s very arbitrary as you find what the threshold of what normal and abnormal is … But a lot of times you have patients who have pituitary problems or have chromosomal issues that they’ve had all their lives and they’re basically underdiagnosed, or they’re not diagnosed.”

The Defense Health Agency issued implementing guidance for the program on Sept. 2, describing the new screening and treatment pathways as effective immediately. By the following day, however, the guidance and an accompanying Pentagon statement had been removed from government websites.

The draft “Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization” has been temporarily rescinded to allow for updates, a U.S. official told the DCNF; however, the “Interim Guidance on Testosterone Deficiency Screenings for Active Duty and Reserve Component Personnel” remains in effect, according to the official.

The proposal also runs against existing guidance from the Endocrine Society, which says there is insufficient evidence to recommend population-wide testosterone screening of asymptomatic men. The organization recommends diagnosing hypogonadism, a condition in which the body does not produce enough testosterone, only when a patient displays symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency and repeatedly records unequivocally low testosterone levels.

The Pentagon initially unveiled its “Warfighter Performance Optimization – Total Force Fitness” program in a memorandum from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on May 6.

The goal of the program was to create “a rapid pipeline to identify, validate, and scale innovations and capabilities that give our warfighting teams a decisive edge,” according to the memorandum.

Low testosterone in men can cause reduced sex drive, erectile dysfunction, infertility, loss of muscle mass, thinning bones and anemia, according to the National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus.

“My assertion is, when you’re 25 years old, and you feel well, and you know you’re doing great. That’s when you should have a baseline testosterone level checked,” Tobias Köhler, professor of urology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and president of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America, told the DCNF. “And the purpose of this check is, of course, not to necessarily give treatment, because you know before you even check the blood test, you ask the person, ‘How do you feel? You doing well?’ And the answer is going to be yes, because they’re 25 and they feel great. And so, independent of what the t-test shows, the purpose is not to diagnose them with hypogonadism when they’re 25.”

Köhler explained that men should have a test done when they are young and healthy, because different men have different baseline levels due to the way their bodies manage testosterone.

“So some guys at age 25 may have a level of 800. That’d be a pretty good level, high, and feel amazing. And other guys would have a level of 450 and feel equally great, right?” Köhler told the DCNF. “But if you take those two same men, and they both come back with a test level of I don’t know 380. You’d be much more concerned for the guy who has a baseline level of 800 rather than the one who has a baseline level of 450. You see, so because there’s this inherent biological variability of what is normal for each individual male, I think it’s important to know what your baseline is.”

Although a large majority of individuals do not need Testosterone Replacement Therapy, one medical expert told the DCNF that there can be significant life improvements for individuals who do need the therapy if they are treated with medicine that can boost natural testosterone production rather than explicitly injecting testosterone.

“All of your clinical symptoms tend to resolve, meaning your marked fatigue … we’re talking about overall, far-reaching malaise and fatigue that improves; mood improves significantly,” Miner told the DCNF. “Mild to moderate depression improves, not severe depression. Sleep often improves significantly when you replete. Muscle mass improves over a period of time, say nine to 12 months. You see … more lean body mass, meaning lower fat mass, and more significant muscle mass with resistance training.”

A positive screening result would not necessarily have meant that a service member immediately began taking testosterone. The Pentagon’s withdrawn clinical guidance called for confirmatory testing and consideration of a patient’s symptoms before hormone therapy was approved, according to Military.com.

While there are differing opinions among medical experts as to whether or not the testing is a good or bad practice, the experts largely agreed that U.S. health problems are contributing to a general decline in testosterone among American men.

“It certainly affects service members because, like all of the U.S., we have issues,” Miner told the DCNF. “We have epidemics of obesity and what we call metabolic syndrome, which are elevations in blood pressure, elevations in blood sugar, and elevations in weight, marked obesity. So those are all prevalent in the armed forces, and it’s made worse by men in combat because they have issues of sleep deprivation, which is key to causing testosterone deficiency, and they have marked fatigue and significant stress, which also [lowers testosterone].”