Men, if you haven't been feeling quite
yourself in the boardroom or in the bedroom, you might want
to talk to your doctor about a condition popularly called
male menopause.
The butt of countless comedy routines, male menopause is no joke to
men like
Charles Amos. For the 55-year-old financial consultant
from
Houston, the male version of the change of life had left him
with constant fatigue and a lagging libido.
A blood test ordered by his physician, Robert S. Tan, revealed that
Amos' body was producing little or none of the vital hormone
testosterone.
Tan,
author of The Andropause Mystery (AMRED Publishing),
immediately put Amos on testosterone-replacement therapy.
Despite its bad reputation as the he-man hormone that's the root of
all male aggressiveness, testosterone plays a physiologically vital
role throughout a man's life. In the womb, well-timed surges of the
stuff help shape the male genitals. In adolescence, the hormone,
produced by the testes, is responsible for many of the physical
changes that separate the boys from the men: a deeper voice, larger
muscles, and hair down there.
However, sometime between the age of 45 and 65, production of
testosterone, along with a number of other hormones, begins a long,
gradual decline. In a small percentage of men, production drops too
low, triggering the condition popularly known as male menopause.
It's a concept physicians have only recently begun to get a handle
on.
"Doctors are where they were probably 30 to 40 years ago with
female menopause in terms of acceptance and understanding of the
condition," says Jed Diamond, author of Surviving Male Menopause
(Sourcebooks). "Back then, doctors told their female patients that
their problems were all in their heads. Today, we know better."