Two patients ask me this question, and they ask it from opposite directions. The first has slept six hours a night for twenty years and feels fine. He wants to know whether the warnings apply to him. The second sleeps nine hours, wakes up tired anyway, and wants to know what is wrong. Until recently the honest answer was that sleep research mostly measured how people felt, or how long they lived, without much in between. A study published in Nature this year measured somethin

A patient came in recently with a printed menu from a wellness clinic. Fourteen peptides, each with a short description, each priced by the month. She wanted to know what was known about them. That turned out to be a longer conversation than either of us expected, because the list combined compounds that have almost nothing in common. Some have been studied in tens of thousands of people. For others, the human research has not really begun. The word "peptide" was the only thi

You have described the symptoms more than once. Fatigue that does not improve with sleep. A flat mood that is hard to explain. No motivation, no drive, no real interest in things that used to matter. Your libido is gone. You are losing muscle no matter how consistently you exercise. Your labs come back normal. You are told it might be stress, perimenopause, or just the season of life you are in. Sometimes an antidepressant is offered. What almost no one checks is testosterone