question from a user
How often do you check labs and how soon after a protocol change do you re check them?
AlphaMD's Answer
We always want to start by getting lab work done before treating a patient. This helps to Dx hypogonadal symptoms if they're far below what we would expect, or acts as a guidepost if someone has low T symptoms but is higher and perhaps has relative hypogonadism.
After a patient is on TRT, if they're not feeling the way we expect or if they have side effects that are abnormal and neither can be addressed by changing their dosages slightly, then we would want to run more testing then. Either the same as the initial testing or if we feel it my be Estrogen related outside of what is normal we would ask to run this test as well. The same for other outliers and special tests.
However if everything is going great & the initial call has been spot-on, the patient feels awesome, and there's no reason to suspect something is off we will not continue to test a patient over and over. We aren't here to waste people's money by forcing tests unless they want to know for their own sake, which we are happy to provide testing if that is the case.
If we do need to go the route of adjusting a dose & it's a small tweak, we would probably repeat the above steps with the same reasoning.
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