Our post on drugs and documents found in the Sedona resort room occupied by self-help guru James Ray requires a correction and a clarification related to the Michigan doctor of osteopathy who, according to publicly-available records, prescribed some of the drugs as detailed in these publicly-available documents.
1. Correction: Dr. John Crisler was referred to as an “Internet physician from Michigan.” To be clear, he is a physician with an office in Lansing, Michigan, with an internet presence at allthingsmale.com. On his website, he lists an “Office Visit Fee – Office or Virtual” for $60.00 and “Anti-Aging Consultation” for $495.00. The patient information link on this page leads to a “Coming Soon” placeholder.
2. Clarification: According to his website, Dr. Crisler’s medical practice specializes in “testosterone replacement therapy,” or TRT, to treat hypogonadism. His frontpage prominently displays his talks and memberships in the “anti-aging” community. Some of the drugs employed in TRT are also used by bodybuilders but the apparent intention of TRT is to restore normal testosterone levels. In the case of Mr. Ray, the publicly-available document from the search warrant affidavit simply refers to the drugs as “treatment therapy.”
For reference, this was the paragraph from the original post:
Dr. Crisler operates the website, allthingsmale.com, and offers in-clinic and online consultations. The frontpage of his site argues strongly that he is in the business of anti-aging therapies as shown lecturing to the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and offering subscriptions to Life Extension Magazine. Further exploration of his website reveals that he specializes further in assessment of low testosterone levels, or hypogonadism.
I welcome any and all feedback to clarify this post. I would, however, encourage first that one read the original post in its entirety.
Questions came to light after two posts went up on discussion forums at the All Things Male MuscleChatRoom.com and the anabolic steroids section of Meso-Rx Men’s Health Chat at mesomorphosis.com. We received 98 and 90 hits, respectively, from each of those sites (barely 5% of our last 4000 visits) and several commenters protested that TRT was being unfairly conflated with bodybuilding anabolic steroids.
It really pisses me off the way that he keeps referring to it as anti aging/bodybuilding, as thou it were some undercover way of getting steroids for bodybuilding enhancement.
d00d, do you not see the irony that you wrote this on a forum called “MuscleChatRoom?”
But I do stand corrected and will refer to this drug combination as testosterone replacement therapy. I suspect that as I age and face the inevitable decline of testosterone levels, I may become a candidate for such therapy.
My original post did make a lengthy point that, in medical terminology, testosterone is a steroid with anabolic activity but that the general public thinks of anabolic steroids as the semi-synthetic compounds sold on the black market. Testosterone, instead, is a naturally-occurring anabolic steroid that is available by prescription as a transdermal patch, gel, or injection.
The primary purpose of the post was to document the backstory on my ABC World News Sunday appearance last week where I was asked to comment on whether these agents had the potential for inducing in Mr. Ray behaviors that could have contributed to his actions observed at the sweat lodge tragedy in October. Last Sunday’s article celebrating the life of Kirby Brown, a victim from Los Cabos, describes these events. I noted that I am not a board-certified endocrinologist, or a physician for that matter, and that I could only comment on the effects that the drugs could have in a hypothetical person. Moreover, I was not privy to Mr. Ray’s behavior prior to being prescribed these drugs.
However, I’ll leave it to the reader to peruse the forum threads at MuscleChatRoom and Mesomorphosis to observe the personalities of other TRT users. Props to anyman for rising above the fray.