
Before 1905, there were no ‘hormones’ - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660818/randi-epstein-aroused-hormones-endocrinology-health-science
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partiallypro
The headline strangely doesn't match the article, in no place does it say they
are "overhyped" outside the headline. The last question revolves around
pseudoscience and scams...but I'd hardly call that "overhyped." If anything I
think hormonal effects in the past few years have been underhyped, especially
in the topics of behavior between men and women.

~~~
taksintikk
I too believe it’s underhyped. Especially for men.

andropause ie “Male menopause” is rarely discussed but it’s affects on
behavior/mood/energy/overall health are profound.

~~~
CryoLogic
I agree 100%, but I still think there is a lot that we don't know about
hormones.

Testosterone replacement therapy has some great benefits, but there are 8+
other known androgens floating around that science doesn't understand very
well.

Like if you have sex drive problems, very recent studies are showing that DHT
may be more important than Testosterone.

It seems like testosterone is the important one, but a % of your testosterone
is converted into DHT that's why. Some people have low conversion rates.

Similarly, there is both free and bound testosterone. Free testosterone seems
to have a much larger impact on muscle growth. But you can have high
testosterone and low muscle growth if you have a lot of SHBG in your blood
stream clinging to your testosterone and preventing it from binding with the
androgen receptors.

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oconnor663
> The word and concept of “hormone” only date back to 1905. Before that, what
> did we believe was regulating our bodies?

This question seems to give too much importance to naming a thing, in terms of
how much it means we understand that thing. It's not like before hormones were
discovered we knew _nothing_ about biochemistry. And even a hundred years
later, there's still so much we don't understand.

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blackbrokkoli
The headline is weird. I mean, that was an interesting read why not just title
it "A brief history of hormones" or something? You can use this headline
(maybe adapt the timeframe slightly) tfor like 1000 different things that went
big recently. Public transport, digital screens, internet, climate change,
breast cancer prevention...

~~~
neaden
The author of the piece generally doesn't get to write the headline, which can
lead to conflicts like this at times.

~~~
degenerate
That's the job of the editors AKA clickbait managers

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speakeron
_" It was the ability to, for the very first time, measure hormones down to
the billionth of a gram. That’s like if you took a gram of salt and threw it
into the ocean, and it had a powerful impact."_

That's about 10 orders of magnitude out. Not as bad as the vacuum energy
calculation, but still quite a wide miss.

~~~
freetime2
I also got stuck on that sentence for a minute. The idea of being able to
throw a gram of salt in the ocean in Florida, wait a while for the salt to
disperse, and then measure the difference in a water sample taken in New York
sounded implausible.

Also, when you talk about sensitivity, don’t you need to talk about the amount
_per_ something? E.g a billionth of a gram per milliliter?

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dekhn
I really got an appreciate for hormones when I worked in DNA structure.
Hormones play a critical role in regulating DNA through proteins called
transcription factors. Often, when I see people digging through SNPs trying to
explain problems I ask them how much they know about hormones and
transcription factors- typically get a blank face in response.

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tcj_phx
Something important about hormones, that this article completely avoids, is
how the pharmaceutical industry abuses the actual findings of science to sell
products.

A British doctor, Katharina Dalton, noticed that her monthly miseries went
away when she got pregnant. She coined the term "Premenstrual Syndrome"
("PMS") for women's problems that go away as soon as their period starts. She
further found that her patients' experience of PMS went away with the
injection of Progesterone USP, which is the hormone that gets most amplified
during a pregnancy.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=ODI4QwtEGIYC](https://books.google.com/books?id=ODI4QwtEGIYC)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=lpRsAAAAMAAJ](https://books.google.com/books?id=lpRsAAAAMAAJ)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=yII3AQAAIAAJ](https://books.google.com/books?id=yII3AQAAIAAJ)

[https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0091856086](https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0091856086)

A later scientist figured out how to use Progesterone USP without injections.
Industry sells micronized (finely-ground) Progestone USP pills, but these
don't work very well on account of the first-pass metabolism.

In the mid-century, while Dr. Dalton was doing her science, Industry was
teaching doctors to prescribe the synthetic estrogen DES to prevent
miscarriages. Now we know that DES causes cancers in the children of the
treated. Whoops.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol)

Today countless women are given prescriptions to "regulate" their hormone
cycles, or to protect them from getting knocked up. These prescriptions --
marketed as "birth control" \-- use hormone-analogues that aren't actually
perfect replacements for the natural hormones.

The steroid cycle only works with the right inputs -- cholesterol, thyroid,
Vitamin A:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidoge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidogenesis.svg)

The tragedy of the situation is that the practical implementation of the
science of hormones has gone exactly nowhere since Dr. Katharina Dalton's
initial research in the 1950's. The modern standard of care specifically
condones modern doctors' replacing a foundational step in their patients'
steroid cycle (Progesterone USP) with an imposter (Medroxyprogesterone
Acetate, etc). Some women do fine with this substitution. Some women never
recover.

The anti-science of prescription fake-hormone marketing is an ongoing travesty
and tragedy.

~~~
debacle
> Some women never recover.

Can you explain the supposed implications?

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CryoLogic
Here is an example, which is how most sex hormones work:

1\. Your adult body produces enough testosterone to have 400-1200ng/dl
testosterone in your blood stream.

2\. You inject 100-150mg of testosterone ethanate into your muscles weekly.

3\. Initially, that 100-150mg of exogenous testosterone puts your testosterone
levels at around 1000-1800ng/dl.

4\. Your pituitary detects this, and decreases the amount of luteinizing
hormone released. This is a signaling hormone responsible for regulating the
production of the testicles, among a few other things.

5\. Your naturally testosterone production stops, dropping you to
400-1200ng/dl again. But now all exogenous. (this happened because your body
detected you didn't need to make anymore)

6\. Over time, since your testicles are not being used the cells atrophy and
are catabolized.

7\. You quit TRT, and are down to 0ng/dl

8\. Over a few weeks of no testosterone, your body attempts to increase
production but must regrow cells in the testicles.

9\. Often this takes around 2 months to get up to a normal range again. You
might get to 300-700ng/dl in those months, aka lower than before.

10\. Over several more months nearly all men will recover full testosterone
production and be back to normal.

Some men however, in a rare case will not begin secreting LH again (secondary
hypo) or will not be able to regrow the cells in their testicles to produce
enough t again (primary hypo).

The same feedback loops occur in progesterins, estrogens and other androgens.
I believe the thyroid hormones T3 and T4 also have similar feedback loops.

~~~
bluedevil2k
There's a lot of errors in this: for example, in step 4, the hypothalamus
actually detects the rising estrogen levels in the blood stream and signals
the pituitary which in turn signals the testes to stop testosterone
production. (Testosterone gets converted to estrogen)

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cultureulterior
If you read Dorothy Sayers 'Unpleasantness at the Belladonna club', you'll
find that people were even back then obsessed with what they called 'glands'

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k__
No wonder sick gains appeared only in the second half of the last century.

