THE TESTOSTERONE REVOLUTION
SAAD ALAM WAS WORRIED.
His doctor had called him into the office to talk about his latest test results. At 35, Alam had been feeling off his game for a while. His energy levels had tanked, his brain was like a sieve and he had the sex drive of a week-old banana. Worse, despite working out religiously, he was growing a set of baby love handles. He’d gone to his doctor to try to figure out what was wrong and now he was about to find out. Was it cancer? Something worse?
Nope. The diagnosis: Alam was suffering from “existential millennial angst”. Frustrated, he went on to see a dozen more specialists before one finally deduced, via a blood test, that his testosterone level was very low. Endocrinology experts say that a healthy man’s testosterone should range from about 260 nanograms per decilitre (ng/dL) or 9 nanomoles per litre (nmol/L – as T is measured in Australia) to 923 ng/dL (32 nmol/L). Alam scored a 187 (6.4 nmol/L). “The doctor said, ‘You’ve got the testosterone levels of an 80-year-old man’,” he recalls.
If the diagnosis was alarming, the fix was relatively simple. The doc prescribed hormone therapy and within three months, Alam says, he felt like his old self again. But the story does not end there. Four years after he walked out of that first doctor’s office, Alam is the founder and CEO of a telehealth startup called Hone that offers “hormone optimisation” to men in the throes of middle age.
Launched in April 2020, the company has a sleek website that promises “More energy. More confidence. More drive. Delivered to your doorstep”. Hone resembles other players in the online men’s health space, such as Mosh, which provide meds for erectile dysfunction and hair loss without the need for awkward conversations with your doctor. But Hone also represents a new phase in the way men view, and use, hormone-replacement therapy. Once the favoured elixir of aging boomers and cheating athletes, testosterone is now being embraced by younger generations, who find its promised benefits enticing, especially because new science reveals there’s also a lower risk of side effects than previously believed.
Companies like Hone are bringing T out of the world of sketchy hormone clinics and extreme-bodybuilding websites and making it available to stressed-out millennials trying to kill their dad bods. The median age of a
