I read an interesting piece the other day about how the idea of “male menopause” treatments may be successful to varying degrees, largely due to a placebo effect.  The placebo effect just means that because you think something should or will happen, you actually create the reality that it is happening.  In other words, it’s psychosomatic - created by your own body by your own will.

It talked about how the male menopause is really just a gradual drop in the male hormones called androgens in the man’s body - actually more specifically, the decline and almost total absence sometimes of the male hormone testosterone. 

Doctors are now recommending that just like men get PSA tests, they may also want to be tested for testosterone levels to prevent unpleasant symtpoms of andropause, or male menopause, and to get the hormone drop back into balance.

Male menopause, or androgen deficiency - or andropause, whatever you want to call it usually happens in men starting in about their forties, and can happen up into the fifties as well.  Just like female menopause, the timing depends on the individual.  Men are asking their doctors more and more about testosterone therapies for this phenomena as they become more aware that there is a sort of male equivalent to menopause and would like to prevent or alleviate it before the symptoms get bad.

Testosterone supplementation comes in forms of patches, gels, or injections.  The treatments are suspected to be placebo because there is no real proof that they acually work, unless you count the proof that the patients swear they are helping them. 

The only other problem with testosterone supplementation is that we don’t really know about the long term effects of using such a therapy, since it hasn’t been around for too long, so this may be a reason in itself to try to seek natural options.