Bend Real Estate and Free Testosterone

You may ask what does a bunch of busy home builders have to do with your testosterone levels?

Well the real estate market story in my town of Bend, Oregon is a perfect example of why it is not how much total testosterone you have, but what is important is how much is free and available to get the job done.

During the real estate boom from 2001 to 2005, Bend was deluged with thousands of people from California who chose to move here to live in a beautiful rural location in a much bigger house for much less money. Home builders followed and houses went up everywhere making Bend the #1 appreciated real estate market in 2004. The ironic part of it all was, even with all the builders, if you wanted to build your own home it was almost impossible to find one. Waiting times were over a year and cost per square foot reached $300 sg/ft! 

Here is the ironic part. When the bubble bursted and the housing market came to a skid, so many builder left  Bend that there were less builders then there were prior to the boom. Yet, even with so few builders, because they were almost all free and not bound to other jobs, if you were one of the few people who still wanted or could build a home, you could have two or three builders bidding on your project at prices 40% ( $125 sg/ft) of what you would have paid just 5 years ago!

This is exactly the concept with testosterone. You can have high levels of total testosterone but it is only the fraction that is free that matters to you to get the job done.

We will need a little science to explain.

96% to 99% of all testosterone (TOTAL) is bound to a protein called SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin) and is virtually completely inactive. That means that only 1% to 4%  of all your testosterone (FREE) is able to interact with the receptors on the cell. The problem is that your levels of SHBG can increase with age, stress, estrogen levels, diet and many other reasons and can cause your free testosterone levels to decline by a factor of 4 to 5 times!

So, what is the point?

Because of this we frequently find that men can have normal or even high total testosterone levels but still suffer from low testosterone issues because their SHBG levels are high resulting in low or deficient levels of the active free testosterone.  Or on the other hand, some men can have low or low normal levels of total testosterone but because their SHBG levels are low, they can still have normal or even high normal levels of free testosterone

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The upshot is....

It is absolutely ESSENTIAL that you assess your levels of free testosterone. Assessing only your serum levels of total testosterone is not only worthless but frequently misleading resulting in no restorative therapy when it is not needed and hormone treatment when it is not! 

And when it comes to assessing your levels of free testosterone, both the research science and our years of experience clearly show that  saliva hormone assessment is the most reliable and cost effective method of doing this. And that is a topic for another post.