His Doctors Ran a Full Panel, Called His Testosterone Normal, and Sent Him Home With Osteoporosis and No Cause

By Dr. James Mitchell, Internal Medicine

They ran a full panel, told me my testosterone was in range, and sent me home with osteoporosis and no cause. The number they checked was the wrong number, and it took me a year to find that out.

I was 61. I had never broken a bone in my life.

Negative 2.7 in my spine. The only person I had ever heard say the word osteoporosis out loud was my mother.

I put in 34 years on heating and cooling. 2 trucks, my name on both doors. I sold it at 59 and I still go in 3 mornings a week to help the kid who bought it price out jobs.

I have carried compressors up basement stairs my whole life.

The Panel That Closed the Door

The endocrinologist ran everything. Thyroid, kidneys, vitamin D, testosterone.

He came in with the printout and told me my testosterone was in range. He said it the way you read off a weather report.

Then he told me nobody really knows why this happens to some men, wrote a word on the chart, and reached for the prescription pad.

Idiopathic.

I looked it up in the parking lot. It means we could not find it.

Every page I found after that was written for a woman. Every support group too.

I did not tell my wife for a week. Longer, if I am honest.

20 Phone Calls and 9 Minutes in the Room

So I went looking for somebody who would actually look.

I called 20 endocrinologists over 4 months. I kept the list on the back of an invoice.

One office told me they were not taking new patients without a diagnosis and a treatment plan already in place.

I said if I had a treatment plan I wouldn't need the appointment. She said she understood, and that was the end of it.

The one who did see me kept me waiting 7 weeks. 50 minutes each way, 40 dollars at the window, 9 minutes in the room.

He read the same panel the first one had and told me the same thing.

In range.

I drove home and I started to wonder if I was the problem. If I was making more out of this than a man ought to.

That is the part nobody warns you about. After enough rooms, you stop being angry and you start being embarrassed.

So He Got to Work Fixing What He Had Clearly Broken

I bought the calcium. Citrate, not carbonate, because carbonate barely absorbs.

D3, not D2. K2 so the calcium would go where it was supposed to. Magnesium at night.

Then boron and zinc, because the men's forums swore those raised testosterone.

I took all of it every morning for 2 years. My next DEXA scan came back worse. Not held. Worse.

By then I was doing math on everything.

Every twinge in my back, I would stop and wonder if that was a fracture. Every time I leaned over the truck bed. Every sneeze.

61 years old, standing in a parts aisle, afraid of my own ribs.

I did not sleep much that year. I would be up at 2 in the morning with the phone, reading threads I had already read, typing osteoporosis in men into the search bar like it was going to say something new.

The Sunday Phone Call

My older brother Dale called that Sunday, the way he does every Sunday.

I do not know why I told him. I had not told a soul. Maybe because he is 3 years older and it always felt like he got everywhere first.

He was quiet for a second.

"I know," he said. "Same thing happened to me 2 years ago."

He had never said a word. Not at Thanksgiving, not on the phone, not once.

I asked him why not.

Because he could not stand to say it out loud, he said. A man is not supposed to end up with this. He wanted to fix it first. And he did.

He told me to sit down. He said he was going to explain something no doctor had ever explained to him either.

He started with the part I needed most.

"You did not do this to yourself."

The Number They Checked Was the Wrong Number

Figure 1. Almost all of the testosterone in a man's blood is locked to a carrier protein and never leaves the bloodstream. Only the free fraction reaches the bone-building cells. A standard panel measures the total.

Then he walked me through it slow, the way he does everything.

Bone is not a dead frame that just wears down, he said. It is living tissue. My whole life it had been breaking a little down and building a little back.

The thing that tells a man's bone to build is a signal, and that signal is testosterone.

But here is what almost nobody checks. Most of the testosterone in your blood is not usable. It rides around locked to a protein, bound up and inactive.

Only the small free part that is not bound to it can reach your bone and tell it to build.

So the number they checked and called normal was the wrong number.

They had read me my total, he said. Total is almost all the bound part, the part my bones could never touch.

The free part, the small piece that actually reaches bone, was the one thing nobody measured.

A man can carry a total at the very top of the range and still have almost nothing getting through to his bones. The size of that number never told me how much was arriving.

And if a man's total does come back low, he said, it is the same story pointed sharper. The free part is lower still, and not one calcium pill was ever aimed at freeing it.

Then he told me this was never a woman's disease I somehow caught. In a man it runs on testosterone, and that is about as male as it gets.

Why the Calcium Never Had a Chance

Every pill I had been taking was aimed at the wrong thing.

The calcium and the D3 and the K2 were material with no crew to lay it. The boron and the zinc were trying to make more testosterone, not free up the part that counts.

I sat there and for the first time in a year I did not feel like a failure.

A signal had gone quiet in a gauge nobody reads, and 2 doctors read me the wrong number and sent me home.

So I asked him what he did about it.

There was one thing, he said, that raises the free, usable testosterone your body already makes. Without being a hormone. Without shutting your own production down.

He wouldn't do the shots. He had read what they do.

They flood you with more total testosterone, your own production quits, you are chained to a needle for life, and they still never touch why the free part was low.

I asked him what it was.

A purified mineral called shilajit. The active part is fulvic acid.

In a study of men, he told me, it raised their free testosterone to about 120 percent of where it started, while their own production kept running.

The exact signal his bones had been missing, turned back up, with no needle.

And in a placebo controlled trial in people with bone loss, the ones who took this same mineral rebuilt bone while the placebo group kept losing.

Not held. Not slowed. Rebuilt.

The Question He Asked Before Anything Else

The first thing out of my mouth was the prostate. Our father had prostate trouble at the end and I was not going to trade my bones for that.

It is not a hormone, he said. It does not flood you with testosterone. It frees up what you already have. That is the whole reason it does not do what the prostate warnings are about.

And in laboratory studies, this same mineral made cancer cells die while leaving the healthy cells around them unharmed.

In every human study ever done on shilajit, not one serious adverse event has ever been recorded. Not one.

It is a natural mineral resin, not a drug. There is nothing in it that fights what a man is already taking.

So why has no doctor ever handed me this, I asked.

Because you cannot patent a mineral, he said. There is no rep carrying it into an office.

What He Actually Took

The one he settled on is called Optimum Shilajit. 60 tablets, 200 milligrams each, in a small box.

It is 78% fulvic acid. Most of what sits on Amazon is 15 or 20 percent, untested, and you've got no real idea what is in it.

It comes from the Altai mountains, cold pressed. A small family in Florida third-party tests every batch for heavy metals and mold, and it is California Prop 65 compliant.

Purified resin, not the cheap powder that wrecks most of the fulvic acid before it ever reaches you.

2 tablets in the morning with breakfast.

I ordered it that night.

What Changed, and When

Week 1, nothing happened. I almost called Dale to tell him he had wasted my money.

A few weeks in, it was not my bones I noticed. It was the mornings.

I was waking up with something in the tank again. The weights I had been quietly avoiding started feeling like mine.

Months in, I stopped doing the math.

I carried a compressor up a customer's basement stairs in October and did not think about it again until I was back in the truck.

Then the follow-up DEXA scan.

Negative 1.9.

The same doctor pulled up the old images, then the new ones, then the old ones again.

He asked what I had changed. I told him. He did not write any of it down and he did not have an explanation for me.

That was all right. I had stopped needing one from him.

That night I got the first panel back out. The one that said in range.

I read it again at the kitchen table with the free number sitting right there in the same column it had always been in. Low. Unremarked on.

My wife read it over my shoulder and did not say anything for a while.

It was never proof I was healthy. It was proof I had been read wrong.

For a year I had carried that page around like a verdict on me.

Dale spent a year fixing this in silence before he could bring himself to tell me. I am not doing that to the next man.

Real Men, Real Results

Where Can You Get Optimum Shilajit?

Optimum Shilajit is only available on their official website. It is not sold on Amazon, because quality cannot be controlled there.

Every order is backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee.

You either get your number moving or you get a full refund. The risk sits on them, not on you.

It is a subscription you can cancel in one click, and a real person answers.

60 tablets, 200mg each. 2 a day with breakfast. Less than a dollar a day.

Dr. James Mitchell's Rating ★★★★★ 4.8 Stars

I took a fraction of a star off for one reason. Nearly every man who writes to me about it says the same thing, that he wishes somebody had run his free testosterone 10 years earlier.

If a doctor ever read you a testosterone number and called it normal while your bones kept going, they checked the wrong number.