Powers,
Just wanted to share my experience with HPTA shutdown and my PFS journey. This post isn’t recommending any treatment.
In short, after attempting heavy steroid protocols, I stopped steroids hoping my HPTA would naturally rebound. After 2-3 months of misery, I got a full hormone blood panel which showed all 0s. My system was fully shut and had been full shut based on half lives of the drugs I stopped for about 2 months.
To regain any sense of feeling normal, I had to go back on TRT. When I pinned Testosterone, I experienced 2 weeks of a full window of being cured. Body odor raged back, my personality and energy was back, but sadly like most windows, this one ended with a brutal crash. Almost as if the body reverted back to previous settings all at once after 2 weeks of reintroduction of the testosterone.
I am not sure if this adds more information to your theory; but my experience seems the “backlog” was cleared and I could feel testosterone again for a short while. Unfortunately, it seems my extended HPTA shutdown did not fix the “closed door” at the exit and the backlog pilled back up, resulting in a massive crash.
Based on my experience, I do think bringing the body to the HPTA suppressed state may be step one (the system may be hypersensitive to change in this stage), but there is a step 2 that is missing to fix the issue here it seems.
I’ve thought of pulsing DHB and valproate as a clean androgen signal with HDAC, but haven’t gotten to suppressing my system again as my body has been through so much, I am brutally fatigued and can’t risk it right now. Who knows maybe the answer is to use finasteride when the HPTA is shutdown this is just not an easy problem to solve with the tools we have available.
TLDR: Extended HPTA shutdown did not seem to reverse PFS for me, although it did create a massive window for a couple weeks upon reintroduction of testosterone.