We called ibuprofen “vitamin M” and ate it by the fistful, and Dr. Mark Gordon says that habit may have quietly walled off the very thing the Pentagon now wants to hand back in a syringe.
In the SEAL Teams and across most of the military, we didn’t call it ibuprofen. We called it vitamin M, for Motrin. Sore knee, screaming back, headache that won’t quit? Take some vitamin M and drive on. And these weren’t the little 200-milligram tablets from the drugstore. They were 800-milligram horse pills, and plenty of us threw back two at a time, for years.
I ate them like candy for most of my adult life. Nobody forced them on me. I asked for the horse pills and doubled up when they felt weak, so a piece of this bill is mine to pay. When Dr. Mark Gordon told us what those pills may have been doing the whole time, I got quiet.
Here’s his claim. Ibuprofen and its chemical cousins can build a wall around your testicles, so they stop hearing the signal your brain sends telling them to make testosterone. The pituitary keeps shouting the order, louder and louder, and the factory downstairs never gets the message.
Then Mark pointed at the thing that got him to email me in the first place. The same institution that handed us vitamin M by the fistful now has a directive to screen every man over 30 and offer him testosterone. And in his view, that fix is aimed at the wrong target completely.
Fair warning before we go further. I’m not a doctor. Everything here is Mark’s clinical read and my own experience as one of his patients, so take it to your own physician before you change a single thing.
Testosterone just sounds sexy
Mark’s first move is to widen the frame. Your endocrine system is a whole orchestra playing at once. We fixate on testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and growth hormone, and Mark points out there are 20-plus other hormones doing just as much work, quietly, because they don’t sell. “Testosterone sounds sexy,” he said. “It sounds real sexy, man.” The others don’t, so nobody markets them and nobody thinks about them.
Will named the deeper habit underneath it. Modern medicine loves to pick one thing, name it the enemy, and attack it, while the actual system it’s plugged into has a hundred moving parts. Hormones are the case study. The brain makes its own class of them, the neurosteroids, and they steady your mood, your sleep, your thinking. Wall off the signal and you don’t just lose the number on a lab sheet, you lose the machinery that holds a man level.
The wall is where the ibuprofen comes in. Mark says the literature going back to 2020 shows the NSAIDs blocking the brain’s message to the pituitary, which is the gland that tells the testicles to fire. He talks about a selenium cycle as one way to help walk that back, and there’s more where that came from. I’m not going to list doses here, because this is exactly the stuff you sort out with a doctor and not with a newsletter.
Screen everyone, ask nobody why
Now the directive Mark came on to sound the alarm about. As he describes it, the Defense Department wants annual testosterone screening for service members 30 and older, with testosterone replacement offered to anyone who comes back low. Active duty and reserve.
His problem with it is one question the whole plan skips. Why is the testosterone low in the first place? Nobody’s asking. And Mark’s numbers make the fix look reckless. A healthy young man makes something like 4 to 10 milligrams of testosterone a day, call it 28 to 70 a week. He’s watching men get handed 200 milligrams in a single weekly shot. Push a body that far past what it makes on its own and it does what bodies do with a flood, it shuts down its own production, which can cost a man his fertility and can thicken his blood enough to risk a clot.
So Mark works the other direction. He reads the pattern between testosterone and luteinizing hormone, then reaches for something like clomiphene, pulsed rather than daily, to wake a man’s own system back up instead of replacing it. He treats the inflammation and the brain chemistry and the head injury underneath the number.
This one isn’t abstract for me. I’m a vet who ate vitamin M for years, and I’m on Mark’s protocol now, so I’ve watched the difference between chasing a number and fixing what’s under it from the inside.
The injury you can’t see on a blood test
Here’s the part that matters most to me. Mark’s whole life’s work is the link between brain trauma and hormones, most of it done with veterans and operators whose bodies paid for the job. Blast exposure, the scuds and mortars and IEDs and years of heavy gunfire, can damage the pituitary directly. And when that happens, a man’s blood testosterone can read perfectly normal while the hormone production in his brain is devastated. An injection into the arm never reaches that. You’d never even go looking if all you did was chase the one number the directive tells you to chase.
The stories are the argument. Mark described a major out of Fort Hood on 8 different medications, who sat at a screening of the documentary Quiet Explosions and asked, on the edge of tears, how come nobody told me this existed. They brought him into the program and walked him off most of the meds. Another man called two weeks into treatment and said, “I’m 100 percent now.” A retired Navy lieutenant who’d run the nuclear plant on a carrier lost vision in one eye and function in a hand and a leg before anyone connected it to his brain.
Mark’s picture for all of it is a gas tank. A shot in the arm is like tapping the fuel gauge to make the needle jump. He’d rather put fuel back in the tank. His whole aim is to leave a man his own ability to make his hormones, which is the exact thing a lifelong shot of testosterone takes away. I keep wondering how many guys are walking around right now, medicated for a number, while the real injury sits upstream where nobody’s looking...
What to do about it
Look hard at your vitamin M habit. If you’re taking ibuprofen or another NSAID most days, bring Mark’s concern to your doctor. Don’t start or stop anything on your own. Just put the question on the table and let a professional weigh it.
When a number comes back low, ask why. A low testosterone reading is the start of the conversation. Ask your doctor what’s upstream of it, ask what your luteinizing hormone is doing, and ask what a prescription would suppress before you fill it.
Get the whole picture before the quick fix. Sleep, inflammation, the medications you take, your head-injury history, all of it feeds that number. Start by baselining how you’re actually functioning day to day with our free Awareness Self-Assessment, about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 is the full list of questions to walk into your appointment with.
If you’ve eaten blasts, say so out loud. Breaching, heavy weapons, IEDs, years on the range. Mark’s whole case is that repeated blast exposure can wreck the brain’s hormone production even when your blood work looks clean, and no injection reaches it. Put your exposure history in front of your doctor. And reply and tell me your own vitamin-M-era story, I read every one.
Talk to your own doctor before you touch any of this. I’ll say it a second time because it earns the repeat: this edition is Mark’s clinical view and my experience as his patient, and it’s a reason to walk into your doctor’s office with better questions, full stop. Reply with the one question you’re going to bring to your next appointment, and I’ll build a follow-up from what comes back.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Dr. Mark Gordon is one of the pioneers connecting hormones and the brain. He’s spent decades on the link between traumatic brain injury, hormones, and mental health, most of that work done with veterans and operators, and he’s featured in the documentary Quiet Explosions. He runs Millennium Health Centers and this is his third time on the show, which puts him in a very small club. Will and I brought him back for the quiet war of male hormones, the new push to screen and medicate, and why he thinks it’s aimed at the wrong thing.
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Until next time,
Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider
Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness
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A note before you start. None of this is medical advice, and none of it is a protocol to run on yourself. It’s a way to think, and a set of questions to bring to a real doctor. Mark is the physician here. I’m a guy who learned this by living it.
