Uncommon Testosterone (Introduction)

Cold Plunge Therapy for Boosting Testosterone and Improving Your Life

Note: This post is the draft Introduction from my book, Uncommon Testosterone: Cold Plunge Therapy for Optimizing Sexual Health, available on Amazon. I’ve taken the chapter on testosterone from my much longer book ‘Uncommon Cold: The Science and Experience of Cold Plunge Therapy’ and expanded it, updated it, and I’ll be releasing it as a shorter, stand-alone hardcover title so that people who want only to read about the sex hormone stuff can read it all in one place without having to buy the whole thing.

Although I worked with an Editor for Uncommon Cold, what you’re seeing here is raw, unedited, stream of consciousness. If you have the inclination, I welcome your suggestions for improvement.

When my prostate specific antigen (PSA) test results suggested I should get a prostate exam, I opted for ice baths instead. Six months later, my PSA came down to less than 2 ng/mL and my testosterone jumped 400 points to 1180 ng/dL — a value that my lab report said was “too high.”

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Introduction

I was living alone in a rented condominium when I logged in to get the results of my first blood test. Three years earlier I had a wife, three kids, and a 3,000 sq ft home with a backyard pool in a quiet Phoenix neighborhood. Also, back then I was fat, broke, depressed, and suffered from a crippling travel anxiety that stunted my career as an engineering professor at Arizona State University.

I probably would have stayed that way, too, if it weren’t for my wife complaining that she was unhaaaappy and moving back to New York. It was the dissolution of my marriage that finally motivated me to get serious about my own health. Whether I was going to save my marriage or go out on the dating market, I knew I wasn’t going to do it as a fat, 51-year-old loser.

I quit drinking, lost 50lbs, started consulting to boost my income, and after one particularly acrimonious session of marriage counseling, separated from my wife. Now instead of planning vacations with my spouse and fantasizing with her about what our lives would be like when the kids moved out of the house, I was on dating apps, buying new clothes, and trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be.

Now was a good time to find out.

The path I was unwilling to take

At first my results brought me some relief. I had no sexually transmitted diseases, my HbA1c was 5.3% which indicated no sign of Type 2 diabetes, and my testosterone was healthy 736 ng/dL. But at the bottom of my report there was one blood marker highlighted in red, in a text box titled “Values Outside of Reference Range.”

Something called Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) had come back elevated at 7.0 ng/mL. I didn’t know what that was, why it was high, or what that meant.

This was September 2017. The last time I’d had a prostate exam was nine years early, in Rochester NY. You’re probably aware that a prostate exam requires a doctor to insert their gloved, lubricated fingers up your ass to palpate your prostate gland—which is exactly what happened to me.

“Slightly inflamed,” my doctor told me. “Better keep an eye on that.”

I did nothing of the sort.

Instead of running straight to a urologist and begging for a new exam that my corroborate or contradict my blood test results, I went to WebMD, Wikipedia, MayoClinic, and any other website that would help me interpret my results by myself. It took only twenty minutes of surfing around to convince me that I was going to die of prostate cancer, hopelessly alone.

It's important to note that the PSA is a test of inflammation, not cancer. While it’s true that inflammation can be associated with cancer, and that an elevated PSA indicates a higher risk of cancer, I also learned that a PSA test is highly unreliable.

In the moment, that didn’t matter. What I read about the typical sequence of medical procedures that follow an elevated PSA result scared the hell out of me. It went like this:

- An elevated PSA means you get a prostate exam.

- If the prostate exam shows any inflammation, you get a biopsy.

- If the biopsy is positive for cancer, you undergo a prostatectomy and/or radiation.

- After the prostatectomy, chances are good that you will suffer erectile dysfunction for a long period after the surgery, and maybe forever.

That was it.

It felt like my choices were either to end my life by prostate cancer or end my sex life by painful prostatectomy. My catastrophic mind was torturing me with false dilemmas and conscious nightmares. For me, the inescapable, recurring question that my mind kept coming back to was,

“What woman would ever love me if I couldn’t maintain an erection?”

Given the choice between my life and my penis, I would choose my penis.

I reasoned that prostate cancer usually acts slowly, so I probably have at least several months – if not years – to figure this out. I resolved to talk to other men about their experiences, to see if I could make a more informed choice.

Men don’t talk anywhere near enough about their own sexual health. It’s embarrassing, and we’re not wired to risk being vulnerable—especially with other men.

I struggled to discover the right words to start these conversations, so I’m going to share them with the men reading this book, in case the script might help them, too.

I’d usually say something like, “Have you ever had your PSA checked?”

I’d usually get a response like, “Yeah, my doctors insisted. Everybody gets their PSA checked. How come?”

And then I’d say, “Well… I just had mine done, and it came back too high. I was at 7 ng/ml.”

That was all it took for the stories to start pouring out of the men I spoke with. Some of them were older than me, and some of them were younger. They told me what happened to them after their PSA levels came back too high. One told me that his biopsy was the worst pain he’d ever felt. Another told me that the biopsy site had become infected, septic, and it almost killed him. Finally, another told me that he’d gone through with the prostatectomy, plus testosterone suppression therapy recommended by his doctor, and yeah… he was now impotent, but his wife stood by him and they were both thankful that the procedure saved his life.

I knew I couldn’t go through all that.

There were nights I lay awake in bed in the dark, contemplating my own mortality. By then, my son had moved out. My daughter was living with my wife, with whom I was separated from but had not yet initiated divorce.

I resolved not to confide in any of them. I knew that my kids, and even my estranged wife, would implore me to see the doctor, to undergo these pointless medical procedures, and to do it out of love for them. I didn’t want to submit myself to that kind of pressure, but I had to tell somebody that I could feel close to. Instead I resolved to do something about all my fears, anxieties, and insecurities and try to might make my life better.

That’s when I got serious about ice baths.

WHAT HAPPENED to my TESTOSTERONE AFTER USING ICE BATHS for my PROSTATE

The logic of ice baths for treating inflammation is pretty solid. Athletes and medical professionals had been using ice baths to reduce swelling for decades.

I wasn’t being logical.