Hey guys, worried about “Low T”? That’s the drug industry’s marketing slogan for alleged low levels of the male hormone testosterone.
Brand name prescription testosterone products are now being marketed to the tune of $107 million per year in advertising aimed at anxious aging males and their doctors. That number comes from a New York Times piece, appropriately running in the paper’s Business section. (And coming just a few days after our own blog entry on dangerous side effects of testosterone therapy.)
If this is a familiar sounding story, it may be because the drug industry has a lot of experience medicalizing the aging process and touting magic formulas to reverse it. Estrogen replacement for menopausal women was a magic pill thought to be good for preventing everything from heart disease to Alzheimer’s, until a rigorous study was finally published in 2002 showing that Premarin and Prempro had short-term benefits at most and long term caused excess breast cancer, heart attacks and strokes. But the research wasn’t published until the drug makers had made billions off estrogen drugs.
Now it’s the guys’ turn to walk that yellow brick road.