This week I felt like it was a good idea to talk about some of the in office changes clinics like Performance Medicine and the pharmacies are having to make due to a nationwide testosterone shortage.
If you’ve come in to our offices in the last week or so, you probably have heard about the shortage of testosterone.
It’s a shortage of Testosterone Cypionate and it’s going to be affecting every medical clinic and every pharmacy nationwide.
Testosterone Cypionate is the manufactured version of testosterone, and it’s the type of testosterone you get if you’re on weekly shots in an office.
I expect this shortage to last around 2-4 months.
In the meantime, what we are doing is moving patients who get weekly shots in office to other forms of bioidentical hormone therapy.
Manufactured Versus The Compounded Blend Of Testosterone
The compounded blend of testosterone comes from a compounding pharmacy, and it’s a blend of cypionate and enanthate. It’s actually 80% cypionate and 20% enanthate.
In my opinion this blend is a little smoother, and probably a little more potent and longer lasting type of testosterone. So a lot of people actually prefer this form anyway.
This compounded blend has to be patient specific, which means patients get a prescription from us or another provider and will have to take their own vial home with them.
This is what we call a self injecting vial of testosterone, and there’s two ways you can do it.
Intramuscular Versus Subcutaneous Shots
You can inject yourself intramuscular (IM) once a week, which is what we do in office when testosterone cypionate is available. Or you can inject this blend subcutaneously (Sub-Q) twice a week at half your prescribed dose.
I like the twice a week subcutaneous shot because you don’t get a peak and a valley in your levels. This is very similar to what pellets do.
My favorite form of hormone therapy is pellets. The idea with pellets is that you get a nice smooth and even level for about 5-6 months without having to do anything.
We teach patients how to inject themselves (both IM and Sub-Q), and of course if you would rather us administer the shot you would simply have to bring your vial in and we give you your shot from your vial of testosterone.