My HPTA Shutdown Experience PFS Journey (Powers Theory)
u/various (r/DrWillPowers members)
r/DrWillPowersnot verified (mirror crawled ~161 days before 2026-10-07)
Presents Dr Will Powers’ theory
Patient / community self-report
Mentions treatments or doses — not guidance
Summary (paraphrased)
A patient reported that extended HPTA shutdown did not durably reverse his PFS, though testosterone reintroduction produced a ~2-week full remission "window" followed by a crash — consistent with Powers' backlog/clearance framing but suggesting shutdown alone is insufficient. He speculated about pulsing clean androgen signals with HDAC inhibition as a next step.
Why it’s in the corpus
Patient-level data point on the castration/HPTA-suppression approach Powers later formalized (DWP-002). Captures the "window then crash" phenomenon that his 2026 model reinterprets.
Some fields on this page come from the release’s Markdown edition, which carries text the JSON edition omits.
Related records
- Community accountAbout Powers’ workSelf-report · N=1
PFS/PSSD: I'm going to try something interesting…
u/various (r/DrWillPowers members) · r/DrWillPowers
A patient with ~3 years of PSSD followed by PFS described Powers' theory back to the community (metabolite backlog → epigenetic androgen-receptor changes → persistent "crash") and proposed a 30-day fast as an experiment: fasting blunts the HPG axis, induces…
ARDWP-0072026PFSPSSDCore corpus - Community accountAbout Powers’ workSelf-report · N=1
Why does PFS cause numbness only in the penis? 2 years off fin, sensation at 5–10%
u/various (r/DrWillPowers members) · r/DrWillPowers
A PFS patient with isolated genital numbness (normal systemic hormones, no cognitive symptoms) asked Powers about mechanisms for anatomically localized sensory loss — peripheral nerve vs. androgen-receptor vs. neurosteroid-driven sensory processing — and what…
DWP-0092026PFSPSSDCore corpus - Powers gene claim
AR — upregulated expression (~1.7x, citing Khera); theorized epigenetic silencing in his phenotype
Confidence: interview/direct
Citing Khera's published finding of ~1.7x AR upregulation in PFS cells, Powers theorizes intracellular weak-metabolite crowding blocks potent androgens from binding, and that in extreme cases the body epigenetically silences AR expression — producing…
ARPGL-AR2026-04-29; circa May 2026PFSCore corpus