‘Makes No Medical Sense’: CNN Medical Contributor Pours Cold Water on Hegseth’s Testosterone Push

Dr. Jonathan Reiner took aim at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Testosterone push for servicemen and women, saying it “makes no medical sense.”

CNN’s John Berman played video of Hegseth stating that the Pentagon has planned mandatory testosterone testing for troops 30 and over.

“If treatment is recommended,” Hegseth said, “It’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy. This initiative, it’s not about artificial enhancement. It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

“So, first of all, giving men testosterone can increase muscle mass, but not necessarily strength,” Reiner said. “But elevated, very elevated levels of testosterone can have significant negative effects: decreasing sperm count, increasing prostate size, shrinking the testicles. So, this is not like just taking a multivitamin, ‘It will make you feel better.’ There are real consequences for substantially increasing the testosterone levels in people that don’t need it.”

Reiner continued:

By the way, it’s not so easy to test testosterone. It has to be done in the morning. It has to be done fasting. And if it’s low, it has to be repeated. And there are a million men in the military. So there’s a big logistic problem in doing this. But, suppose you test low, but you feel great. I think this creates a coercive environment in the military. Are they going to use testosterone levels in promotion decisions? Are they going to use testosterone levels to help figure out if you’re deployable to to a war zone? And let’s say — and is this going to cause members of the military to perhaps take testosterone so that they don’t measure low so that they don’t have a low testosterone in their medical record? There are a lot of ramifications to doing this, and it just makes no medical sense.

Reiner added, “This is the second time this year that Secretary Hegseth has announced a medical initiative for the military that makes no sense. The first was removing the mandatory flu vaccine, which was followed quickly after that by a large outbreak. So this just makes no sense.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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