So there is free testosterone and bound testosterone (depending on if it is bound to protein).
As reported earlier, the bound testosterone was fine, but Dr. ChatGPT says my free testosterone of “0.58 ng/dL … equates to 58 pg/mL [or] significantly elevated … roughly 20x the usual free testosterone level for a woman your age.” I keep reading that as 10% – 20% higher, but it’s 10 to 20 times higher than expected. It’s the difference between a 10% raise and getting paid ten times your current salary.
See, that’s the kind of thing I get all worked up over. Honestly, at some point after reading that I thought “MAYBE I DON’T HAVE A CYST SITTING IN MY CERVIX MAYBE I HAVE A TESTICLE THAT WAITED UNTIL MENOPAUSE TO DESCEND.”
But then I discovered that I am better at math than chatGPT. I did the math and saw that 0.58 ng/dL equates to 5.8 pg/mL, not 58 pg/mL. I pointed out the error and it answered essentially oops, my bad, and “thanks for pointing that out. That puts you at the high end of normal for your age.”
Still, even though I’m normal I still worry that I might have absorbed a parasitic male twin that left me with one rudimentary testicle AND AN EXTRA THUMB (see?). And now I won’t know for another month what’s up.
4 responses to “Update to testosterone”
Among other things, THIS IS WHY WE SHOULDN’T TRUST chatGPT! It is mostly a text-prediction algorithm, trained on the internet (including the absolute dregs) and does not default to actually doing math or checking ranges. and it gets things mixed up and de-specifies things [i.e. if you have carpenter ants, it may give you advice for how to get rid of normal ants] and over-specifies things [i.e. giving you advice for how to get rid of carpenter ants when you ask it about just generally ants].
AND your medical advice or recipe advice or chemistry experiment advice or computer fixing advice may not only be corrupted from its original text source (i.e. when chatGPT gets confused about how a toilet is assembled, or makes things up when it has gaps), it also may be giving you advice from Bad Idea Sources on reddit or other random forums or some dude’s manifesto about how drinking bleach is the way to fix infections. Sometimes it will average all its inputs out and the results will be correct! and other times… not.
Anyway. Don’t Trust The Plagiarism Machine. It can turn up obscure things that you can then verify by sources (finding needles in a haystack), but it can also turn up obscure (or not obscure) things that just… don’t exist. (some of the needles it claims to have found are not in fact there)
(if you want a chart showing you that you’ve probably got a decent level of free testosterone in regards to how it affects bone density, though: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3070250/ )
KC – Really, I don’t trust it blindly. I did check the math!
I’m glad you checked its highly-sketchy math, yes! That was smart! I thought the post was saying you were still assuming it was right when it said what the normal range for your age was, which it’s also just… not necessarily going to be correct on. It might be! Sometimes! But not other times…
KC – Well, there were a few minutes while I just accepted the bad math.