Dr Alex Tatem

“This is what's being discussed out there, presented so that you, the viewer, can understand the landscape, not so you can replicate it. The single biggest thing to understand is that the community doses retatrutide way lower than the trials did. Where the trials drove people to 4, 9, and 12 mg, the gray market crowd is mostly living around 2 to 4. The recurring pattern in user logs and forums looks like this. Start around 1 mg a week, with cautious ones at 1/2 mg, which is already half or less than the trial starting dose. Then, climb slowly, maybe half to a full mg every 2 to 4 weeks, by feel, rather than a fixed calendar. The reported sweet spot most people settle into is 2 to 4 mg a week, and plenty never go higher.”

“That said, here's what people are doing. The most recent circulating protocols for MOTS-c is somewhere between 5 and 15 mg injected subcutaneously three times a week for 8 to 12 weeks, followed by 4 to 8 weeks off. […] Now, I have seen more aggressive protocols where people are running 1 to 3 mg daily, but biohacker forums are full of variations.”

“Now, the Russian stuff comes as nasal drops with two strengths. We have a 0.1% solution for the cognitive boost and stroke recovery indications, and then a stronger 1% reserve for acute stroke in the hospital. One drop of the 0.1% is about 50 micrograms, and the labeled daily range runs from a few hundred up to a couple thousand micrograms. Usually only run for a couple days at a time. The gray market, meanwhile, is its own animal. Biohackers have reported using nasal sprays, usually somewhere between 100 and 1,000 micrograms a day, usually 5 days on, 2 days off.”

“So, when you go looking in the bowels of Reddit and the Telegram channels, you're going to see roughly three flavors of dosing. First, you have a low dose sleep approach, which is just a few hundred micrograms a night, maybe as low as 10. And then you have a mid-range cycle, which is a milligram or two a day for 10 to 20 days. And then there's the aggressive telomere protocol, which is 5 to 10 milligrams a day for 10 days repeated a couple times a year. And that big one is almost always the one secretly misquoting an epithalamin number. I am not cosigning on any of these.”

“none of this is me writing you a prescription. […] Every pivotal human trial dosed this at 40 mg a day. The gray market crowd, mostly because this stuff is expensive, is mostly running at somewhere between 2 and 10. So, when you see all those I tried SS-31 and felt nothing reports, that isn't necessarily the drug failing you. It might be a quarter of the dose that also did nothing in the formal trial.”

“I can't and will never recommend the use of a research chemical to anyone. But in the spirit of harm reduction, if you insist on trying it, you must be smart. Monitor your blood sugar, do your cardio, watch your blood pressure, keep the dose reasonable, with most research using anywhere from 10 to 25 milligs a day, and cycle it. Do not use this indefinitely.”