Your Libido Isn't Dead After 50. It's Just Missing This ONE Crucial Hormone that You Can Give it TODAY!

Desire Reset Guide 👉 juliemerrimanphd.com/desire

A new paper says testosterone has limited evidence for orgasm. Dr. Juls has the receipts that say otherwise, and she is done watching women get sent home to doubt their own bodies. This one is data, delivered.

You have probably felt it. The moment a clinician tells you your desire is just hormones, or just age, or just stress, and something in your gut goes quiet even though you know better. This episode hands your certainty back. You will hear the numbers from four landmark studies, including the 8,480 woman meta analysis and two New England Journal of Medicine trials, and you will hear them told honestly, placebo groups and all.

Dr. Juls breaks down why the Global Consensus Statement graded this evidence Level One, Grade A, the single highest tier in medicine, and why off label and not FDA approved describe an empty pharmacy shelf rather than a failure of the science. Then she opens the door medicine never even knocks on. Drawing on the SEEKING system, autonomic arousal research, and interoception science, she explains why testosterone can set the stage while your nervous system still decides whether pleasure is allowed to land, which is why some women have perfect hormones and still feel nothing.

Close with the Ground and Receive practice, a two minute reset that teaches your body it is safe enough to feel. Feet on the ground, hand on the belly, hand on the solar plexus, one long exhale, and one question your body has been waiting all day for someone to ask. You are not broken. Your desire went underground, and it is waiting for safety.

What if the reason you've gone from feeling young, passionate, and desirable to feeling disconnected, broken, and like you're living with a roommate instead of a husband…has nothing to do with your age or your hormones?

What if it comes down to a hidden cycle no one talks about - one that keeps women after 50 stuck, waiting for a desire that never seems to return?

That's exactly why I created The Desire Reset Guide.

It's for women after 50, and it reveals the real reason you feel broken - plus 3 simple practices you do over 3 days to finally reconnect with your pleasure, your desire, and your partner. 👉 juliemerrimanphd.com/desire

Have you quietly wondered if you're broken…you're not. The science says so. Listen to Episode 29: Your Body Isn't Broken, The Truth About Desire After 50. 

New episodes Wednesdays & Fridays, 5am CST

This podcast is for women after 50 navigating low desire, sexual disconnection, and body changes who want nervous-system-informed insight into libido, aliveness, intimacy, and embodied pleasure so they can move from tamed to alive and unapologetically hungry.

 No part of this content may be used for AI or machine learning training.

Transcript

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So in this episode, a new paper says the evidence that testosterone helps your orgasm is limited. 8,480 women, four landmark trials, and the highest evidence grade in medicine. Says that paper, girl, it got it wrong. Sexy After 50. Improve sex and intimacy by healing your nervous system so you finally feel turned on and confident. We're waking up what never left. Desire and fire. I'm Dr. Jules. Let's get to it. So in this episode, you're going to hear the actual data, not just pretend stuff, the actual data from four studies showing testosterone improves desire, arousal, orgasm, and pleasure in women over 50. You're going to learn the difference between off-label and limited evidence and why one is a regulatory fact and the other is a quiet dismissal of your body. And third, you're going to understand why your body may still feel nothing until your nervous system decides that it's safe enough to feel again. So stay with me. I've got a lot packed into today. Thank you for being here with me at Sexy After 50. I am so glad that you're going to hang out and hear this stuff today. So I'm handing you receipts in this episode. Very important receipts. Girl, these are not opinions, not vibes, not my clinical hunch after 30 years in the room. Numbers. Because somewhere a paper landed in a journal and it used two words that travel fast through waiting rooms and get repeated to women exactly like you. Limited evidence. And every time those two words get repeated, get printed, a clinician somewhere gets permission to look a woman in the eye and tell her that what she's feeling in her own body. I'm sorry, but it's not backed by science. So today we're going to look at what the science actually says. Then we're going to talk about the medicine, the part, sadly, that medicine still refuses to look at, which is the reason the science alone was never going to be enough for you, anyway. So we're going to start with your root center. And as we look at chakra psychology, we look at um, well, the root is our first chakra. It sits down around our spine, lower spine, um, our sits bones, on down to our tippy toes. And this governs a particular kind of safety that comes from a solid ground under your feet. Facts are ground. So I want to give you some really interesting facts. So in 2019, a research team at Monash University, led by Rechabul Islam and Susan Davis, published a systematic review and meta-analysis in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Journal. And what they pulled together was 36 randomized controlled trials. It's not a small in. We've got 8,480 women. This is not one study with a small sample and a hopeful author. Been there, done that. This is a whole body of evidence stacked and weighed. And what they found was that compared to placebo, testosterone significantly improved sexual desire, arousal, orgasm, pleasure, responsiveness, and self image. Wow. And get this, y'all, it reduced sexual distress. Wow. Not one of those outcomes. All of them. All of them. Testosterone significantly improved. Gonna say it again. Sexual desire, arousal, orgasm, pleasure, responsiveness, self-image, and reduced sexual distress. Wow. So we're gonna take a little time trip back to the year 2000. Oh, it was a good year. I didn't even worry about wrinkles back then. Oh, and Jan Schiffren publishes in the New England, England Journal of Medicine. She publishes, publishes about women who had lost ovarian testosterone through surgery. I was one of those. Women whose sexual function scores sat at 52% of the normal range. On the higher testosterone, testosterone dose, those scores climbed to 81%. Placebo, interestingly, climbed 2 to 72%. And I want you to hear me include that number because I'm not going to do to you what they do to us. The point is the testosterone group went further, significantly further, and the domains that moved the most were frequency of sexual activity and pleasure and orgasm. So then in 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine again published a trial led by Susan Davis. Eight hundred and fourteen women. It's a big end. We're lucky to get that many people in our research. But the testosterone patch roughly tripled the increase in satisfying sexual events. And this was compared to placebo, alongside real gains in desire, arousal, orgasm, and pleasure. So the authors called the absolute size modest, and honest researchers do that. So hold on to that word modest, because we're going to be coming back to it. Because modest and limited are not the same word. And the difference between them, girl, that's this whole episode. So let's hop back to a chakra. And we're going to look at the solar plexus. This is right between your ribs, that soft area on your belly there, upper belly. And y'all know if you've listened to the podcast a hot minute, that that's where your power lives. It's also where you feel it in your body when someone with authority makes you doubt what you know. That hot, kind of sinking, second-guessing feeling, that's your solar plexus getting overruled. So I want to hand you back your power with one distinction. In 2019, the leading menopause and sexual medicine societies in the world convened and issued the global consensus physician on testosterone therapy for us gals. Ten international bodies, and they graded the evidence for testosterone improving sexual function in postmenopausal woman with low desire as level one, grade A. In medicine, there is no higher tier. Grade one, excuse me, level one, grade A is the same grade of evidence we use to justify treatments with no, well, these are treatments that no one thinks twice about. We just think, well, hell yeah, it's it's approved. So now here's the slide of hand. There is no testosterone product approved by the FDA for women in the United States. You heard me right. That is true. Prescribing it means using a male formulation off label or a compounded version. Also true. And those are real regulatory facts. But watch what happens next. Off label gets quietly swapped for limited evidence. Not FDA approved gets swapped for unproven. And those swaps are not honest. There's no approved product because no company took a small market through an expensive approval process. That is a business decision. It is a market failure. It is not a verdict on whether the hormone works in your body. The evidence is grade A. The shelf, girl, the shelf is empty. They are two completely different sentences. And every time someone blurs them together, a woman gets sent home believing her desire, it's a personal failing, instead of it being an underserved market. So with that big cliffhanger, I want to do a quick commercial. So imagine some music going, and I'm just going to pause because I know some of you are feeling two things at once right now: vindicated and still stuck. Because being told the science does not automatically make your body feel it. That gap between the evidence and the experience is exactly the thing I've been building for y'all. It's called Alive, and it's 28 days guided with me to rebuild your capacity for pleasure, presence, and desire. And we're doing it from the inside. And it's not to fix you. We don't fix stuff because you're not broken. It's to reopen the door. I'm not going to sell you in the middle of your own homecoming. I'm just going to let you be curious about it alive. It's coming in August, and I just invite you to sit with that. Okay, so back to our program. We're going to talk about our sacral center again. Well, not again. We haven't talked about it today. Sacral center, that's the chakra right above your root chakra, the lower belly. That's your pleasure center. If you've been with me a minute, you remember this. But it's about sensuality and desire and wanting and receiving. So let me tell you what testosterone is actually doing down there and up in your brain because it is more beautiful than most doctors are going to ever explain. Okay, testosterone is not just a sex drive chemical. You top up like an oil in a car. It feeds a system in the brain that neuroscientists, and she's been on the program before, and we enjoy her, Jacques. Well, I think it's a him, sorry. Jacques Panksup. He named the seeking system. And seeking is the engine of wanting itself. Seeking, man, that's that curiosity and anticipation, the lean toward what you're seeking. It runs on dopamine. And in 2025, research in nature neuroscience mapped how ovarian hormone signaling and dopamine get this. They talk to each other in the circuits that drive motivation. Testosterone is upstream of that conversation. When it declines, the volume on wanting itself can drop. Not because you stopped loving your partner or wanting things, but because that anticipation engine has lost its fuel. And Cindy Metzen, who has spent a career studying the autonomic nervous system and female arousal, has shown that arousal in a woman's body is not only psychological, it is also physiological. Blood, flow, sensation, the readiness of tissue. And testosterone supports that machinery too. So when the data shows arousal and orgasm improving, there is a real mechanism underneath it all. And it's not a placebo, and it's not wishful thinking. This is the body's pleasure hardware getting its power back. And here is where I turn because I'd be lying to you if I stopped at hormones. It's so much more. They're important, but it's so much more. Your heart center, this is the center of our um chakra centers that governs connection and it also governs self-protection. And a body that has spent decades in self-protection has a wall up that no hormone is going to be able to climb. And here's the truth: medicine almost never says out loud, you can have perfect hormones and still feel nothing. Because arousal, the real kind, requires your nervous system to come out of protection mode first. Peter Levine's work in somatic experiencing shows how a body holds threat long after the threat is gone. And then Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley's research on interception shows that whether you can even feel what is happening inside you depends on how safe your system is. And then Lori Brato has run the trials proving that training a woman's attention back into her own body improves desire and arousal. No prescription needed. So put that together. I mean, that's a big deal. You've got testosterone setting the stage. Your nervous system decides whether the show goes on. If you're still living in caregiving and hypervigilance and the low hum of never quite being off duty, your body will keep the pleasure door shut, no matter what is circulating through your blood. And girl, that's not a libido problem. It is, say it with me, a capacity problem. And that right there is the second door. Medicine is not going to open for you. They dismissed the hormone. They never even knocked on the nervous system door. Okay. Before I let you go, let me give you the practice that I call ground and receive. So if you're doing something, I invite you to maybe listen through a bookmark and come back, or stop and do this with me. All it takes is you putting both feet flat on the floor, and I need you to feel them. That is your root, reminding your system there is ground under you. And now you place one hand on your low belly over your sacral center, the place that receives, and place the other hand over your solar plexus, the place that gets to be believed. I need you to unclench that jaw, let your shoulders drop, hear it, squeeze, drop. And take one slow breath in, a longer breath out. And let that long exhale send its quiet signal down the vagus nerve that you are safe in this exact moment. And you do that five times. And on that last breath, you ask your body one question what would it feel like to be believed by my own body? Not by a doctor, by you. Because for a lot of women, listening to this right now, this is the first time in all day anyone has treated your pleasure like it was real. Start with you. Okay. Here's what I need you to carry out of this episode. First, the evidence that testosterone improves desire, arousal, orgasm, and pleasure in women over 50 is level one, grade A, the highest tier in medicine drawn from thousands of women across dozens of trials. Second, off-label and not FDA approved are regulatory facts about an empty shelf. And they are not the same as limited evidence. And anyone who blurs them is dismissing you, not informing you. Third, hormones set the stage, and your nervous system runs the show, which is why the whole story includes both receipts and the reboot. Girl, you're not broken. Your desire, it went underground, and it's waiting for safety, and you're allowed to bring it back. If any of this hit home, go grab my book over on Amazon or my website, Are We Gonna Have Sex or What? It walks you through all of this. I want you to have a beautiful day, and I will talk to you in a few days. They told you the fire dies at 50. They lied. Tap the show notes to download Reignite Your Fire and Desire. Your free 72-hour erotic reboot. Unlock the arousal pathway buried in your nervous system. Reclaim the raw hunger you were taught to suppress. And rewire your body to crave pleasure again. Not because you're broken, but because you're ready to burn. Move from invisible to incredible. I'm Dr. Jules, Keep Burning.