Ashim Matthan: Hi everyone. Welcome to the RhinoMight podcast. My name is Ashim. This is Dr. Kanishka. Today is episode-4 of this podcast, and we are going to be talking about the difference in HGH dosing for men and women.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: So we would like to divide this into three section. One, is there a difference between the dosing? Number two, why is there a difference? and number three, what would be our recommendations?
Ashim Matthan: Right, how would we go about it. And so let’s get to the first question of is there going to be difference. So if you have a 100kg woman and 100kg man is there going to be a difference in HGH dosing for both of them just based on just this information, nothing else. Not about whether someone is a hyper responder, none of that stuff. Just take it as a simple straight forward scenario 100 kg woman, 100 kg man. Is there going to be a difference in HGH dosing.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Assuming that both of them have a Growth Hormone deficiency there would be no dose difference.
Ashim Matthan: Correct. Now here’s where the subtleties come in where they’re going to where there is a lot of individual case that comes into play. We hear stories… We’ve heard over the years all these horror stories and sometimes just highly-highly publicized stories about men who take 20 IUs of GH, 30 IUs of GH sometimes and then of course all these pros after they take 30 IUs of GH, they come down and they say hey just take one or two of Pharma grade. But let’s not get into that. That’s a separate video. What we should talk about is that you hear stories about men taking big dosages. You don’t hear so much about women. And yes, on the surface actually women don’t need to take such high dosages but that’s not because they’re women or anything like that. It’s just that your dose is dependent on your body weight and on average if you look at the data pool that is there, on average women weigh less than men. So because on average women weigh less than men and the calculation and all the research work that has been done almost including the huge study that was done in Japan, it’s all dependent on body weight. So in general whether you’re looking at a 0.3 multiple per lean body mass or 0.5 or whatever you want to play with with it’s all dependent on the individual’s body weight and on average women weigh less than men.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Correct. And then of course especially for women in our clinical practice also we see women taking HRT and being hyper responders to it.
Ashim Matthan: Across the board all HRT.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: All… all hormones. For every single hormone that is there in the body they respond much higher than men.
Ashim Matthan: Right. So even if you look at.. this is little bit off-topic but say for example we’re looking at testosterone. You give a guy say 200 mg of tests. His values might jump up to whatever it comes up to like say 1000, 1200.. that’s like a six time multiple, right 200 to 1200, that a five or six time multiple. With women you give them like 5 or 10 mg and it jumps up to like and that’s going to be like a huge.. that’s like a 15 time multiple sometimes. Yeah 15 to 20 times multiple.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Right. So… That’s for an average.
Ashim Matthan: An average dose.. right, of course. This is all within therapeutic ranges and stuff like that but let’s.. I just wanted to explain and illustrate actually of how this works. Now human Growth Hormone is a bioidentical hormone. If you have you go to your IGF-1 level tests you find out that there is..that I am on the lower side of the reference range I have deficiency what is it called the actual legal term for it?
Dr. Kanishka Jain: For adults it would be called as Adult Growth Hormone Deficiency called AGHD.
Ashim Matthan: Yes. Correct. That acronym, it’s little difficult. But it’s Adult Growth Hormone Deficiency and if you have AGHD… yes if you have that then you’re a… and then you are liable.. you are a legitimate candidate for Growth Hormone treatment for Growth Hormone Treatment. Correct. Within your HRT.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: So the third part of the video which was – What are our recommendations for Growth Hormone dosing.
Ashim Matthan: Correct. So believe me that’s what I was going to say. If you have.. whether you are man or a woman all of these numbers at the end of the day.. This was the textbook definition This was the textbook definition of how Growth Hormone Treatment should be done which is by body weight, etc. etc. But that’s not really how it works in practice at all. Because in practice the way you go about it is that you always want to play on the safer side. That’s one. And two, you always want to work with the reality of the situation. So if someone wants to take Growth Hormone we’d recommend start off at like a really low dose. Maybe, there would be like a difference again between depending on the patient in front of us whether on their body weight or we might recommend for women you take like say just 0.5 IU Or just one click of your pen and for women.. sorry and for man we might recommend say one more IU to start with but that’s how we start right. We start with 1 IU a week or 0.5 IU a week, start small.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: 1 IU or 0.5 IU per day.
Ashim Matthan: Per day. Sorry.. Per day per week. You start off something small like this. Then in the second week you jump it up a little bit like really tiny maybe you go from one click to two clicks. Correct. So what you are saying is 0.5 to 0.75 IUs. Yes. And you would, okay. So let’s talk about one other thing, the elephant in the room there are many, many GH protocols that are out there. I know a lot of you who are experienced lifters and people who are in this life will want to know like which is the best GH protocol. There is no best GH protocol. There is no worst GH protocol either. It’s just about what works for you at that time and you have to be adaptable to the reality of that situation. So if you say for example so there are these protocols. There’s like 2 on 1 off, 3 on 1 off, 5 on 2 off all seven days at a time.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Dosing alternate days.
Ashim Matthan: Dosing alternate days twice a day dosing. There are many, many ways to play with this. So you have to first figure out that what is sustainable to your lifestyle. Remember we’re looking at this from an HRT or a therapeutic standpoint, we’re not looking at this from a bodybuilding standpoint. This is not about getting particular results. It’s just about getting the best type of therapeutic advantage for you which is also sustainable like if for example you really hate injections you don’t like needles at all you’re very scared of it. Then telling you do twice a day just because it might be the most efficient way for you that’s not going to work at the end of the day because you’re not going to be able to sustain that. So in that case you would want to do say once every other day, Right?
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Yeah. You want to do every alternate days to start with it and observe the benefits of it. If you’re still not getting the benefits of it you might want to up your dose or you might want to change the frequency.
Ashim Matthan: Okay. So if we see you select on a protocol any one of them that is sustainable to your lifestyle, that is good for you, you select it now. Now let’s work with that assumption that has been selected. We would recommend that you start with something really conservative something really small say 0.5 or 1 IU. Next week you increase it a little bit and then the following week we increase it again and you keep increasing it a little bit at a time till you notice that there are clinical signs of side effects taking place and once those side-effects kick in and we’re getting into the side effects in a second. I want you to talk about it please. And the the second you notice these side effects you start scaling back down. So you don’t stop. A lot of people make a mistake when they just immediately stop taking GH. That’s not good for your system. Don’t stop anything. Just taper it down a little bit and down to like a really tiny dose. So you might have gone up to say 4 IUs a day for example and you might go back down all the way to 0.5 IUs a day and at that stage over a period of time you might notice that your mind, side effects are disappearing and you wait for that and then you might want to stop or you might want to continue and then ramp it back up. All these options are there on the table for you.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: What we are trying to say is much more.. I’m just trying to simplify what you’re saying.. is that that Growth Hormone can cause side effects but they are reversible and they are dose dependent. Yes. So let’s talk about the side effects. So some of the side effects that may happen when we have. when you have reached the peak limit of your Growth Hormone or peak tolerable dose for your body is that you will start noticing tingling in your hands and fingers. This is because of Edema or water retention happening underneath the skin. pressing on the nerves on your hand Then you may notice that a slight growth of your jaw bones or of your eyebrows. You may start noticing that. This becomes very evident especially in the cases of women where they are able to notice this on a day-to-day basis where they observe themselves much more closely than men.
Ashim Matthan: Right. So it’s when you say eyebrows you mean like the skull, right? The skull.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Yeah. The skull, the bones on the skull, basically they grow, these are the things. These are the things. These are the brows – the Neanderthal look that tends to come in when you start having growth overhere on your eyebrows.
Ashim Matthan: Correct. So exactly and women tend to notice this more so what we know what we, in our experience what we know is that say for example even though everything is body weight dependent and on the surface there is no difference in the dosage between men and women and nor should there be because women are hyper responders and the side effects tend to be more noticeable and unappealing for them because of that we tend to never ever recommend very, very high dosages from them right from the beginning. It might be even extreme circumstances we might say that for a guy.. hey take two IUs a day it could be hypothetically we would say 2 IUs a day but sorry guys I don’t want to jump into that for a woman unless of course she is suffering from major weight gain situation where she’s very, very heavy and she needs to lose weight okay.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Or she has very, very low IGF level.
Ashim Matthan: Exactly. So someone probably very, very old also could be recommended because their IGF levels are really, really, really low.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: And as women age their tendency to respond to hormones also reduces.
Ashim Matthan: Correct. Yeah, exactly. So the tolerance the… the sensitivity makes a difference how fast and how efficient the body is at liking hormones because what we found is that some.. every person I would say has at least one hormone that really agrees with them and that it agrees with you because you’re able to and this is not… this is going to be slightly out of HRT boundaries almost to the point of like when you’re literally dabbling in say for example what would be legally classified as dangerous territory when you are able to sustain really high dosages of that chemical and not have any side-effects. You know when that happens that okay my body really likes this chemical. It has an affinity for it. It’s not going to harm me and it’s important to know and for some women like Growth Hormones for some people Growth Hormone is one of them that it just works beautifully. They will get the cosmetic benefits of it very, very quickly. They will see a huge improvement in hair quality. Improvement in hair quality.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Improvement in skin quality. Improvement in signs of aging like if you have had loose skin it will become tight.
Ashim Matthan: Right so this is when we’re going to go slightly off topic Let’s say I don’t know that we’ve done this and I want to talk about this but it’s a little bit off topic I hope that till this point we answer the question that was asked to us. This is going to be again off-topic If someone comes… and then they’ve been having, they’ve taken a lot of DHTs They experience some amount of hair fall, or a lot of hair fall and they’re unhappy with it and they want to reverse Along with all the other hair loss prevention treatments that are there, Growth Hormone is also lumped in with this, right?
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Yeah. Growth hormone would help in recovery of the cells which have been damaged because of that over exposure to DHTs.
Ashim Matthan: Okay. So Growth Hormone is for multiple purposes. It’s a true healer.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Yeah it’s a true healer while it will also improve the quality of this skin, the hair and everything to do with the hair loss should start reversing with Growth Hormone.
Ashim Matthan: And if just, I know there will be women who are watching this and if they want to know whether the dose of GH is becoming too much for them what you need to do, From what I understand… correct me if I am wrong please, what you need to do is be very, very critical of how you look in the sense that the second you start noticing all the signs of high GH you’ve got to start tapering it back down. That means if you notice water retention under the skin, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome where your wrists and your fingers start tingling or paining, if you start noticing a growth in your jawbone in your actual cranial structure your skull is going to, the bones are going to start changing. When that starts happening and you notice that that it is happening, you got to know that you have entered into the realm of GH has been too high. Your dose is too much. And you need to like taper back down and let allow your IGF-1 levels come down. And once they have come down you can do blood test at that stage to know exactly where you’re at and it’s important to know because if you do you now know both sides of the equation. You know the clinical side of where of what your body can tolerate at XYZ dose whatever the dose is and you also know the exact lab value of what your IGF-1 levels are at that dose which is unhealthy for you. Right.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Correct.
Ashim Matthan: The Growth Hormone is extreme safe and it’s a wonderful bioidentical hormone in our bodies and we do recommend it and the bottom line is that there is no difference in the dosages between men and women. It’s all about the individual, their responsiveness to GH where women are hypersensitive, and the overall dose of GH is all about body weight.
Dr. Kanishka Jain: Yes it is.
Ashim Matthan: Have we missed anything?
Dr. Kanishka Jain: I don’t think so.
Ashim Matthan: Alright. So thanks a lot for watching this video guys and please ask us your questions and the contact details to ask us these questions is in the slide after this. So thanks a lot. Thanks for watching. Bye!