Front Page · Men's Health Desk
Man's Testosterone Comes Back Low, He Pays Cash For A Better Number
He told the second receptionist it was for peace of mind. It was not.
A man's phone buzzed during a Tuesday stand-up meeting, face down between two coffee cups. His GP app had already posted the blood test result. His testosterone had come back low, under the app's own green line. He turned the phone over again and kept nodding along. He told nobody.
Just for peace of mind," he told the receptionist, who already had a form for that answer.
At lunch he read the result a second time, alone in a locked cubicle. The number had not changed at all on a second reading. He decided the problem was almost certainly the sample, not him. The receptionist, he felt, should really keep it somewhere colder.
He emailed the surgery to say exactly that. He did not wait around for their reply. By early afternoon he was parked outside a private clinic, rereading the number on his phone one more time. The number had not improved in the car park either. He went in anyway, for a second opinion.
He gave the second receptionist a reason she had clearly heard before. The reason was "peace of mind." The real question on his mind was about his erections, not his peace of mind. He did not ask that question out loud.
The clinic drew the blood anyway, no questions asked beyond the form. He paid in cash, at the desk, without being prompted. He called it convenience. It also left nothing for his wife to find.
Clinics like this one track repeat visits closely. He did not know his file had been flagged, the way frequent flyers get flagged. He had just joined a category the clinic calls Re-test Loyalty.
He was unlikely to get a different answer the second time. The clinic's own figures agreed: the result almost always matches the first one. He paid again anyway.
The clinic began marketing to him directly. It offered a quarterly bundle, a fresh blood draw every three months, billed automatically at a flat rate. He signed up. It was called the Peace of Mind Plan.
An insurer reviewing his records separately noticed the same pattern. His file was quietly moved to a higher-risk tier reserved for frequent re-testers. His premium went up before his testosterone did.
He still has not told his wife any of this. He has told two clinics and, it turns out, an insurer. This newspaper carried the clinic's subscription advert on the page opposite this story. We checked the number on it twice before we believed it either.