A quick note to contribute to the knowledge pool of whether oral/buccal/sublingual monotherapy is possible.
My venous blood test at trough, 7 weeks into 3 mg Progynova monotherapy taken as 1 mg buccal every 8 hours, showed:
- Testosterone at 3.970 nmol/l (pre-HRT venous: 19 nmol/l).
- Oestradiol at 245 pmol/l (pre-HRT venous: 52.8 pmol/l).
I also continued with the 1 mg finasteride/day I’ve been taking for the last few years.
I wasn’t particularly disciplined about letting the tablet finish dissolving before eating/drinking: I just held it buccally and carried on with life, and if I happened to be in the middle of a meal at dose time I didn’t pause at all. This means it’s likely that many doses had a large oral component.
There was often severe variation in the timing of doses (the morning dose in particular due to sometimes irregular sleep patterns, travel, etc.) but this didn’t seem to affect my mood at all.
I was impressed by how my body reacted to this considering the many posts I’d read about requiring 6–8 mg/day for monotherapy, or that monotherapy on the oral/buccal/sublingual route just isn’t possible; granted, every body has different requirements.
The testosterone level is still higher than the female reference maximum, but if I were to continue with Progynova and target further testosterone suppression, stepping up to 4–6 mg/day would be the obvious next step and there would still be room for further increases.
That said, the Progynova tablets are now going into the backup/travel supplies pile: today the experiment with homemade gel and spray begins, targeting 4 mg/day (2 mg/application). I look forward to this mostly because having a bit of gel on my thighs for a few minutes twice a day seems a much nicer prospect than having to hold a tablet in my mouth for an hour three times a day.