How often do you check labs and how soon after a protocol change do you re check them?

AlphaMD's Answer

Lab work always comes first — a licensed provider reviews baseline results before any treatment begins. This helps to Dx hypogonadal symptoms if levels are far below the expected range, or acts as a guidepost if someone has low T symptoms but is higher and perhaps has relative hypogonadism.

After a patient is on TRT, if they're not feeling as expected or have abnormal side effects that can't be addressed by a slight dosage change, the provider overseeing their care will want to run more testing then. Either the same as the initial testing, or if it may be Estrogen related outside of what is normal, the provider may ask to run this test as well. The same for other outliers and special tests.

However if everything is going great & the initial call has been spot-on, the patient feels awesome, and there's no reason to suspect something is off, providers won't continue to test a patient over and over. Nobody wants to waste people's money on unnecessary tests — though if a patient wants to know for their own sake, AlphaMD is happy to help coordinate that lab work.

If a dose adjustment is needed & it's a small tweak, the provider would probably repeat the above steps with the same reasoning.