"HCG monotherapy" – I tried it so you didn't have to!

Calm Logic said:

wildweasel said:

birdwhacker said:

Begun at 200IU IM ED. Then moved to 400iu EOD.

27yo male

Balls grew slightly. More morning erections. Better energy through the day. Some mild acne at the start. A bit more fluid production.

Then, a week in, the benefits got hard to tell apart, so I stopped.

My dad, 54 year old male, was on it too and I took him off. He broke out more than I did — presumably because he is fatter and aromatized more estrogen, and possibly gained more test since his natural levels were lower. Same story for him: better energy, some acne, then straight back to square one.

Messing with your hormones through HCG just does not look worth it, unless it is for fertility, or alongside a SARMs cycle or exogenous test.

If boosting your test is the goal, HCG won't get you there.
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Did you actually measure your testostetone or are you going by your vibes?

there is medical literature showing it raises testosterone, and doctors actually prescribe it to treat low t.

HCG at 250iu eod lifted my total t by 65%. Stacking enclo on it pushed me to 1200 total t, low super physiological levels

it does increase peoples test lol. You made a pretty wild assumption after 1 week with nothing behind it except how your ball size felt
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Along the same lines:

HCG used on its own against hypogonadal symptoms in men whose total testosterone runs above 300 ng/dL

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https://www.thinksteroids.com/commu...y-help-for-first-timer.134429545/post-3478171

Why not try hCG monotherapy at first? You're a good candidate. Much better to let the body do most of its own work in this case. Also, I personally feel 200mg/week [of testosterone] is way too high starting out. The body normally produces 6-8mg of Test per day...

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View: https://youtu.be/EhP5RvXBi7s?si=rgcu8OKK0E9eedLy

And for enclo on its own:

Another study, this one on enclomiphene citrate, looking at how it restored testosterone in men with secondary hypogonadism, and at its pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics

After 6 weeks of continuous use, the mean (sd) concentration of total testosterone at day 42 was 604 (160) ng/dL for men taking the highest dose of enclomiphene citrate (enclomiphene citrate, 25 mg daily) and 500 (278) ng in those men treated with transdermal testosterone.

Enclomiphene citrate consistently increased serum total testosterone into the normal range and increased LH and FSH above the normal range. The effects on LH and total testosterone persisted for at least 1 week after stopping treatment.

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I cannot say I see what that linked thread is meant to show.

Having 50% of people report feeling better is not much to write home about — especially since early gains may simply reflect the stretch before aromatization kicks in.

It is no accident that outside fertility treatment HCG seldom gets used on its own. Boosting estrogen is where it excels; boosting testosterone is not. What it does is generate intratesticular testosterone, and that substrate is there to be aromatized.

I am not claiming it has no place as a therapy. My point is aimed at the ordinary reader — the one browsing here hoping some fast peptide will restore the drive they had at twenty — and my advice to them is to look somewhere else.

Injections of testosterone remain the safest and most effective route. Should fertility be the overriding worry, look elsewhere — though with ancillaries such as HCG, that worry is no longer what it once was: men on exogenous test are able to conceive without coming off at all.

So HCG has its uses — just not the ones most of us are after.
 
5byfive said:

birdwhacker said:

CNCCurrency said:

birdwhacker said:

Begun at 200IU IM ED. Then moved to 400iu EOD.

27yo male

Balls grew slightly. More morning erections. Better energy through the day. Some mild acne at the start. A bit more fluid production.

Then, a week in, the benefits got hard to tell apart, so I stopped.

My dad, 54 year old male, was on it too and I took him off. He broke out more than I did — presumably because he is fatter and aromatized more estrogen, and possibly gained more test since his natural levels were lower. Same story for him: better energy, some acne, then straight back to square one.

Messing with your hormones through HCG just does not look worth it, unless it is for fertility, or alongside a SARMs cycle or exogenous test.

If boosting your test is the goal, HCG won't get you there.
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Is this to counter the shrinkage test causes in the balls?
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Nope — read the thread title again. Monotherapy.

Nothing else besides reta, BPC, KPV, tdalafil, bronchogen and a handful of vitamins.

For roughly the past 3 years hardly anything has come out when I finish, which made me suspect my balls were not doing their job properly, so I figured HCG was worth a shot. On top of that, reta seems to have killed my sex drive.

Both of those improved somewhat. I was waking up hard more often and producing more when I finished.

My plan is to have bloods drawn next month and come at this from a smarter direction.
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That right there is the answer. In my view it is among the biggest blind spots in healthcare and optimisation — insurers usually will not pay for a proper workup, which is why most doctors skip it. The good news is there is no shortage of companies now selling affordable testing.

These days I am getting labs drawn no less than once every 4 months while I try to dial things in. It is far more involved than I assumed at the outset — a huge number of variables, all of them affecting one another.

Plenty of possible culprits could be behind your problems. With no baseline to compare against, everything is guesswork, and you might end up worse off by accident. Seems like you have already worked that out, and I am keen to see what the results say.
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Yep, that nails it. I always assumed hormones were too much of a maze, but these days, with inexpensive labs plus AI to teach you, there is no good excuse not to take charge of your own health.

As I work things out, I will definitely post more threads in this section.

That said, I stand by my earlier point: for a man who wants his testosterone up but is wary of TRT, HCG alone is not the answer. If you are willing to run labs and do the work, fine — but if you are like me and just want one injection that fixes things, this is not it; you would do better taking boron in the morning and zinc before bed.
 
BlueDog55 said:

Slightly off topic, though not entirely...lol!

Anyone know whether Enclomiphene does anything useful if you are already running test?
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What possible reason is there for running enclo on top of test? If you want a bigger boost, raise the test dose; if holding on to fertility matters, run HCG every few months.

From what I can tell it can be done, though I would not recommend it.
 
birdwhacker said:

BlueDog55 said:

Slightly off topic, though not entirely...lol!

Anyone know whether Enclomiphene does anything useful if you are already running test?
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What possible reason is there for running enclo on top of test? If you want a bigger boost, raise the test dose; if holding on to fertility matters, run HCG every few months.

From what I can tell it can be done, though I would not recommend it.
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Good to know... Thanks for clearing that up
 
I will not waste effort trying to convince you that what you are doing is a connerie. You are far too certain of yourself, and nothing I say will move you.

My remarks are aimed at everyone else reading this forum.

Dr. Thierry Hertoghe is who I am drawing on — one of the foremost authorities worldwide on hormone therapy (you will probably discover that this field has two big academic societies, and they spend their time criticising one another).

His method, naturally, begins with measuring every measurable thing (and doing so as accurately as possible; thyroid hormones, for instance, get measured across a 24h span rather than through one ordinary blood draw, since a single draw does not show you everything).

As a practitioner his rule is: never give one sexual hormone by itself. Pair it with at least one more, ideally as many as three. Someone with real experience might go past ten hormones in pursuit of overall equilibrium.

The documented material lives on his online medical school and in his books (the physician editions, hefty enough to prop up a car, rather than the ones written for lay readers).

Back when DHEA+Pregnenolone was part of my regimen, he told me that acne showing up signals an excessive dose, and that it should be adjusted if it sticks around or spreads.
 
eidos said:

I will not waste effort trying to convince you that what you are doing is a connerie. You are far too certain of yourself, and nothing I say will move you.

My remarks are aimed at everyone else reading this forum.

Dr. Thierry Hertoghe is who I am drawing on — one of the foremost authorities worldwide on hormone therapy (you will probably discover that this field has two big academic societies, and they spend their time criticising one another).

His method, naturally, begins with measuring every measurable thing (and doing so as accurately as possible; thyroid hormones, for instance, get measured across a 24h span rather than through one ordinary blood draw, since a single draw does not show you everything).

As a practitioner his rule is: never give one sexual hormone by itself. Pair it with at least one more, ideally as many as three. Someone with real experience might go past ten hormones in pursuit of overall equilibrium.

The documented material lives on his online medical school and in his books (the physician editions, hefty enough to prop up a car, rather than the ones written for lay readers).

Back when DHEA+Pregnenolone was part of my regimen, he told me that acne showing up signals an excessive dose, and that it should be adjusted if it sticks around or spreads.
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Sounds to me like you are agreeing that HCG on its own is a dead end...
 
You could argue most of us have no need for more testosterone in the first place. Mine sits in the normal range and I am content with it — these days reta is all I take. Before dropping 50+ pounds I was hypogonadal.
 
Take big doses daily and your hormones will inevitably fall out of balance. The smarter play is a moderate dose sustained over time, instead of expecting everything to change overnight.
 
jamesprt said:

Take big doses daily and your hormones will inevitably fall out of balance. The smarter play is a moderate dose sustained over time, instead of expecting everything to change overnight.
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Ideal for what purpose, exactly?

Fertility clinics, after all, hand out 3000iu or more two or three times weekly.

A daily 200iu is pretty near what your body produces on its own, just nudged up. It also tracks the body's natural rhythm — the opposite of spreading doses out, which ramps up aromatizing.

400iu every other day comes out about the same — close enough to 1400iu weekly, which is an entirely ordinary amount.

The usual maintenance figure for keeping the testes working is 250iu 3x weekly.

Is your own experience telling you something different?
 
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