Testosterone is ascendant in our culture. That’s clear if you eye the newly inflated deltoids of tech billionaires, tune in to Joe Rogan’s podcast or follow Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s own personal health regimen, which includes testosterone replacement therapy, or T.R.T.
The numbers are striking: Prescriptions for testosterone grew to nearly 12 million in 2025 from fewer than 1 million in 2000, according to data provided to The Times by the market research firm IQVIA. That is very likely an underestimate, as more men are now obtaining the hormone outside the traditional medical system, from telehealth platforms often marketing T.R.T. as a lifestyle product rather than a treatment for disease.
In April, the Trump administration’s health department announced plans to broaden access to T.R.T. for men. The doctors I spoke to were optimistic about this change, saying that many men who have gone untreated could benefit. But they also worried that the hypermasculine culture celebrated online is driving younger men in particular toward unrealistic — and potentially unhealthy — expectations around a medical treatment with real risks.
My full Times Magazine article is a deep dive into the world of testosterone, examining what the research tells us about this treatment and why men are increasingly pursuing it.
Testosterone deficiency is a real problem for many men.
Low testosterone can cause muscle loss, fatigue, obesity, sexual dysfunction and depression. To get a diagnosis of testosterone deficiency, men need to exhibit these signs and symptoms and have blood tests showing their testosterone levels are lower than 300 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range is 300 to 1,000).
Testosterone deficiency can be caused by damage to the brain structures that signal the body to make the hormone, or in the testicles, which produce it. But testosterone levels also slump slowly as men get older. Testosterone levels are also declining at the population level, a trend Kennedy has called an “existential” crisis for humanity.
While an estimated 5.6 percent of men have testosterone deficiency — a rate that goes up significantly in older men — only 1 in 5, at most, gets treated for it.
Recent studies have quelled long-running concerns about some of T.R.T.’s risks.
Not long after testosterone was first popularized as a treatment for male ailments in the 1930s, a study suggested that it could increase the risk of prostate cancer, largely ending its medical use for the rest of the 20th century. Another serious concern emerged in the 2010s, when several studies suggested T.R.T. was linked to a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In response, the F.D.A. issued a warning label on testosterone products and required drug makers to fund a randomized, controlled trial to provide rigorous information on the risks of the treatment. That 2023 study, the largest T.R.T. trial to date, amounted to a vindication, finding no increased risk of heart attacks, strokes or prostate cancer. The F.D.A. removed the warning label last year.
Increasingly, many men without low T are going on it anyway.
The pandemic spurred legal changes allowing telehealth providers to prescribe controlled substances without seeing patients in person, causing a surge in telehealth prescriptions for T.R.T. That boom coincided with a rise in younger patients being prescribed testosterone: While testosterone deficiency most often affects older men, prescribing data analyzed before and after the pandemic found that prescriptions rose most rapidly among men ages 35 to 44.
Research hassuggested that these direct-to-consumer platforms frequently prescribe T.R.T. regardless of whether patients actually have clinically low levels of testosterone, and the American Urological Association reports that roughly a third of men who are prescribed the drug do not meet the criteria for a diagnosis.
Testosterone is often promoted as a panacea for all that ails men.
While popular figures like Rogan and the health podcaster Andrew Huberman have spoken about their own use of T.R.T., framing it as a medical treatment for aging, many influencers go further, amplifying the message that being “low T” is synonymous with low status, weakness and sexual inadequacy. Others advise men to take T.R.T. to optimize their appearance, build muscle and attract women. Many of these influencers profit from promotional links to supplements that supposedly boost testosterone, or to T.R.T. clinics.
T.R.T. marketing often ignores the health risks — notably, to fertility — while overselling the potential benefits. “Online, everyone is saying testosterone is the solution to all of your problems,” said Dr. Justin Dubin, director of the Men’s Sexual Health program at the Miami Cancer Institute. “And we have to be very clear that it’s not.”
There is an increasingly blurry line between T.R.T. and the ideology around it.
I spoke to 14 men taking testosterone. Many who had clinically low testosterone before starting treatment described the effects as transformative, talking about having more sex and gaining more muscle, but also about quitting drinking, doing more housework and generally feeling, as one man told me, “part of life” for the first time in a long time.
But the interviews also made clear how muddled the question of medical “need” has become for a treatment that has become so intertwined with rapidly shifting notions of what it means to be a man. One young man told me that he believed that there really was a masculinity crisis that testosterone could help fix. “The marketing is like, You’ll be a better man and more masculine. And it’s funny, because it is marketing — but it’s literally all true,” he said. “That’s literally what will happen.”
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