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My brother is a mere half inch shorter than me, a source of merciless mockery from my end. Well, it's good natured, it's not like he's suffering, being actually hot, to the extent that he has most of the girls in his med school after him, and all the gay guys, including a professor.
Very luckily for him, he's borderline asexual so doesn't give a shit about women. I wish I was so lucky, so I cherish every advantage I get. If there was a pill that shut off my libido without other side effects, I'd take it regularly and PRN.
Once can be a coincidence, twice is
enemyfriendly action. If you count my very large extended family, I'm not the tallest, but that's more evidence the genes are percolating in their somewhere. Nutrition certainly made everyone taller over the ages, but it is not remotely enough to account for 6 extra inches alone, not when the genes aren't helping. After all, I did once have a CT brain and they didn't find a pituitary adenoma, though that would have made me both tall and milkable.Besides, even if it's a fluke, the solution remains the same. Yay, more HGH, what can it not do?
This is actually what is at the root of the dispute between men and women. That men only like women because "all I am to you is a hole for you to stick your dick in". Without that desire, men don't care about women and don't want to interact with them. Of course women are going to resent being treated as a sex doll. We want men to like us for ourselves, to be interested in us as a unique person, not an interchangeable set of tits'n'ass.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. If men only like women because SEX and nature prodding us all to reproduce the species, while women want LOVE besides/outside of sex again because of nature and forming groups to support and raise the new offspring, then we're all screwed because the traditional guard rails around sex/love = marriage and kids are being torn down and melted for scrap and we're getting nothing in return except unhappiness.
If we were all ape troupes back on the savannah, with one dominant male monopolising the females and the less dominant males sneaking around for sex, it might work out: males get sex or fight each other for access to females, females get offspring and support from other females in the troupe and genes from the winners of the male struggles. But we grew big brains on top of our instincts and we want seventeen contradictory things at once.
I do believe women can be interesting as people to men. It's just that, without sexual attraction in play, they have to compete with the other men on that front.
Maybe women find it naturally harder because they aren't interested in the same things as men to connect with them platonically as well as their male friends. Maybe most women never learn to be interesting due to having sexual attraction on their side. When I match with a woman on a dating app and see an empty bio or something that barely provides any hooks for a conversation, I am certainly overcome with an intense wave of apathy, no matter how hot she is.
I don't think that women and men should necessarily have the same interests; I don't see why men shouldn't have their own little clubs and women theirs, but I also see why that was lobbied against because there were advantages to being 'all boys together' networking. I think "your spouse should be your best friend as well" and the whole laundry list of requirements makes marriage tougher, because no one person can be all-in-all to another.
But if men and women can't be friends and have mutual interests outside of sexual attraction, I think that's bad for society as well; if both sexes are only looking at the other sex in terms of "do I find them fuckable?", then they don't see that person as a person, merely as a list of requirements to be ticked off and if failed, then not even considered. Yeah, I'm influenced here by Catholic teachingson human dignity and the idea of a person as a whole person, not a convenience and lifestyle add-on.
A lot of it is that now we are so used to choice, and a range of options, and maximally making our lives more convenient and to our own requirements, all over the entire range of experience, that we're shoving relationships into the same "I want to order off the menu and add in the secret sauce and can I get the special offer deluxe?" mindset of choice, choice, choice or else it's all wrong and someone is to blame.
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I wish I could be asexual as well, certainly would free up a lot of space in my head.
Risks of HGH for kids? I don't trust Dr Google on this one.
It's great, I'm aromantic as well which means I don't give a flying fig about men or their views of me as fuckable or not, and I have no stress around all that 😁 Means I relate to men on the level of "do I find you a likeable specimen of humanity?" and not "me want snoo-snoo", so if I don't like you, I don't have to tolerate your bullshit (unless you're my boss) on the faint hopes of "well maybe I can get a situationship* out of this".
*Stupidest fucking concept I've heard to date, what the hell is this need to invent new degrees of idiocy? You're fucking around, sleeping around, casual sex, fornicating. It's not a 'thing' or any kind of romantic association. It's mere convenience. 'Oh no, see, it's this special new modern thing that past generations never even thought of'. Past generations fucked around casually just fine, friend.
One downside to being asexual other than not having the drive to pass on your genes or ending up old without a family is...
If your're a man, you actually need to be competent and attractive in general for a lot of other things than getting women. No small part of me working out religiously, working hard on my career and not playing video games all day is thanks to those things making women more likely to like me. But I benefit from being fit, having money and not wasting my time nevertheless, even outside of fucking women.
If you're doing those things because you like them and get benefits from them, then "women will be more attracted" is secondary benefit. If you're doing it primarily because "women will be more attracted" and then it turns out they're not, that gets to be a problem of resentment on both sides: "I wasted all this time and effort for nothing, women are bitches" versus "joined an evening class in pottery, guy there was friendly and seemed nice while we were chatting about the class, the second he learned I had a boyfriend he ignored me and then dropped out of the class, guys only want one thing".
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You ideally give them during puberty, and as long as you don't go overboard and end up in gigantism territory, it's not much of a concern.
I don't recall anything else particularly pressing, but you don't need all that much of it to have noticeable effects. You can look into the therapy Messi received if you want a simple example investigated with Thorough Journalistic Depth.
While I'm not an endocrinologist or paediatrician, I know that it's often offered as a treatment for dwarfism due to HGH deficiency. Haven't heard of any serious issues when dosed correctly, and it's an ongoing therapy so plenty of time to reduce doses or stop if something isn't right.
Just don't take it when your bones have fully ossified and fused, I'd say 18 is concerning, 21 dangerous. Unless you really crave the neanderthal look, I heard it's in vogue these days.
Hey, sorry for the oddball question (I promise not to take this as medical advice, I have an endo and will ask them these questions but would much appreciate some info on this topic if possible): What if you have a 22-year old with growth plates that are still slightly open in proximal tibia, distal femur, proximal femur and proximal humerus, but that person is 3-4 inches shorter than the rest of their generation in their family, with noticeably narrower bones as well?
For background, I was born a bit premature with borderline low birth weight, grew normally up to age 9, and then developed anorexia nervosa at age 9 which lasted right up until age 20, at times mildly underweight and at times significantly underweight, maybe briefly normal weight for a 1-year period around age 12. I have osteoporosis as a result, which I suppose is a sign of how bad the malnutrition was, but I've recovered since, and have not been underweight for 1 year and reached an optimal BMI of 20 now at age 22 (completing recovery from the eating disorder). I take this recovery as a win, but at the same time I am insecure about my frame size, mainly height but also things like hand/foot size, shoulder width, arm length, overall ribcage diameter, and seeming lack of appositional growth of my bones too, although I'm not sure when most of the appositional growth is supposed to happen so I'm not sure if it was the anorexia or lower birth weight that did that.
I have heard of catch-up growth; I've read about cases of hypothyroid men in their mid 20s growing inches after HGH treatment, but I'm not sure if the level of delay in growth maturation is less significant for anorexia than for hypothyroidism, making me wonder whether I have as much potential to "catch-up" as the hypothyroid men due to our having different etiologies of growth retardation. Apparently hypothyroidism is one of the hormonal effects of anorexia so perhaps they're not as different as I currently believe but I'm not informed enough to know whether this is the case.
Would HGH make any sense at all in this situation? If there is any growth potential left, would it just happen naturally now that I'm at a normal weight, without the need for HGH? I'm thinking the minimalist approach would be to let nature take its course now, and if my body can indeed grow more, it will do so, without the risk of hormone treatment. But another side of me wonders whether, due to my age, some sort of kick-start is needed for the growth process to commence?
Also, regardless of etiology of growth retardation, if plates are still technically open but nearly closed in someone's 20s, is HGH worth it or just too risky?
Thank you.
Oh dear. I am really not an endocrinologist or paediatrician.
This is incredibly far outside what I can reasonably consider my expertise, and you have asked a complex question to boot.
Growth plate fusion is very important, and given your age, you'd need an xray to very carefully examine your growth plates to figure out how safe it is.
To put the difficulty of your question in perspective, I'd be barely more at ease if asked by someone if they needed open heart surgery.
I could ask you to elaborate and provide reports and so on, but I'm still not remotely comfortable with the topic, especially at that age, it would entail me cracking open textbooks and research papers and feverishly reading, and it's not laziness that makes me wish to avoid it, it's the fact that I still wouldn't be sure if my advice was sound in your case, especially with the risk of acromegaly.
You absolutely need a different kind of doctor, not a psych trainee, this is genuinely above my paygrade and I would have to be crazy to comment without significantly more experience in the subject, which seems rather unlikely to come about.
My apologies, while I'm not one to gatekeep medical advice, this isn't something I feel qualified to speak about, especially with so many confounding factors. My innate reaction is "probably not a good idea, if the plates are almost fused" but even that isn't a statement from confidence.
Gotcha, no worries man, I totally understand the hesitance, and I appreciate your answer. I just figured I'd ask here of all places because there's usually a lot of lesser-known but enlightening perspectives/info/discussion on here and this is something I've been pondering for a while now. I'll check with an endo I'm going to see soon, my family's opinion is I should just play the minimalist approach and see what nature does now that I'm eating right. But I will ask the endo though, and we'll see what happens from there.
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The trouble is, you will get the arms race. If everyone is now 6 foot minimum, the new filtering level will be 6 foot 3. Then future versions of you will be "I hope my sons won't be 6 foot manlets, I'm going to put them all on HGH so they're at least 6 foot 6".
Do that enough and we will end up with the 7 foot NBA version of "we must ensure our kids have all advantages" you're scorning.
On the plus side, Elendil the Tall is the role model to aim for 😁 "2 rangar minimum, 6 foot shorties DNI"!
Giving your kids anything that, that explicitly gives them an edge in the dating market is gauche and very outside the Overton window. Hell taking steroids yourself for it is..
He doesn't need to worry about an arm's race anytime soon.
He's talking about being perfectly ready to start his kids on HGH the second they don't seem to be measuring up to some arbitrary metric in his own mind, and people are happily discussing polygenic embryonic selection (and companies are offering this as a service) for the benefits of future kids. Not alone for "there's the high risk of this disease in our family background, we'd like to avoid that for the child" but "why don't you give your kid every benefit?" and they too like to quote the surveys on being tall etc. It's probably only my own impression, but I'm already getting hints of looking down at having kids the 'old-fashioned way' without selection, even if you don't have fertility problems, because duh why leave it up to chance when you could select for the tall genius extrovert beauty contest entrepreneur transhumanist baby?
So I'm sure there will be an arms race amongst the people smart enough to be this stupid about it.
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I expect my grandkids, if they exist, will be simulated entities in a Matrioshka brain. When it's the size of the sun and change, I think it becomes a bit moot 🧐
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At least if bodymodding is available to all, then everyone will be able to reach whatever equilibrium there is (square-cube law should eventually put a cap on height).
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