daledale (imported) wrote: Thu May 10, 2012 5:19 am
I have use DP for a good while, 450-600mg biweekly does the job just fine. No desire, no erections no anything
Yes, biweekly is a decent interval but a lot of people thinking of taking depo for castration think they can use the same cycle women do for birth control which is every three months and that doesn't work because the half-life in men is much, much shorter and they need much more active in the blood to create the castration effect than women need for the birth control effect. Also, the longer time between intramuscular injection relies on it slowly seeping into the blood stream which is different than half-life -- an injection in men CAN be slow, but the problem is that it is very variable. Once it hits the blood stream is actually metabolized very quickly.
With injections, doing more frequent injections of a proportionately reduced dose is pretty always better (within reason, isn't really practical more than one injection a day). For example, your dose is pretty high actually, so what you're doing is you're getting a big spike (overdose sort of) then it halves every two days and by the end of the two weeks you're down to a much reduced dose (probably close to ineffective at that point). But it is further complicated by the unpredictability of the the intramuscular injections time to enter the blood stream.
Of course the problem with injections is that they are injections, with some annoyance, management of needles (not really something to have around if you have roommates or live with family or kids), and some people are squeamish about them. So people like to do infrequent injections.
But if 600mg every two weeks works, then 300mg once a week would even be better. In fact, if you do the math with the half lifes, you can actually get same average level in the blood with even less (probably 150mg) weekly.
Infrequent doses are some waste of money, and possibly some adverse health effect to spike the blood levels that way.