How the Low T Industry Is Cashing in on Dubious, and Perhaps Dangerous, Science

Sebron Snyder

Mike Sisk is a University of Tennessee alum and, now, a big booster.

In a light-gray suit and University of Tennessee orange tie, usually with the jacket off, Sisk is not an imposing figure. Average height and medium build, with a balding pate, the body of the man who considers himself "patient zero" in the low T industry is not the greatest selling point of his low T empire - until he speaks.

His words spill out in the rapid-fire patter of a born salesman, as if he's trying to get his entire pitch in before the door closes in his face. The cadence increases when he talks customer service. That salesmanship, how he distinguishes his clinics from doctor's offices, how he gets men to look forward to their appointments instead of dread them, is his major contribution to the industry.

"The docs own you inside that room, and then as soon as the door opens, I own you again."

Not too long ago, Sisk didn't own much of anything. "I was just a country kid from Tennessee," he says. During his time at the University of Tennessee, he loaded boxes onto airplanes at night for FedEx. After he graduated, the company offered him a sales position, and he moved to Dallas. Here, he met his wife, a second-grade teacher in Oak Cliff. He then got a job at Ernst & Young, one of the world's largest audit firms, and put his MBA in finance to use. "I never really was a corporate guy," Sisk, who now runs a growing corporation, says. "I didn't fit in there, but I learned a lot, wouldn't take anything for those days."

Sisk moved back to Tennessee to care for his ailing father, who owned 7-Elevens. Despite his foray into the corporate sphere, he considered himself a one-man crew. "My dad was an entrepreneur," he says, and "I was always just that serial entrepreneur." About 10 years ago, he returned to Dallas and started his own finance company.

Then "I turned 40," he says, "and it was like somebody had turned the light switch off."

Sisk didn't know what had happened, why he was feeling so blue, so he visited his doctor. "He was doing various tests and said, 'You're just getting older and you're depressed. We're going to give you some Zoloft.'"

Instead, Sisk says he "found a guy who was willing to do some other tests, and he said I have low testosterone. He sent me home with testosterone shots."

For Sisk, the injections seemed too good to be true. "I was like, 'There's no way this shot makes me feel this good and something bad not happen.' I got to talking to doctors, and there's two schools of thought: There's guys that hate it, and there's guys that love it, so I really had to do my homework to understand what was happening there. Doctor Google was very helpful. I did a lot of stuff on Google."

American men have tried ways to slow down, even stop, aging's effects for generations. John R. Brinkley, the "Goat Gland Man," became a Texas legend for transplanting slivers of goat glands into men's testicles in the 1920s and '30s, a piece of quackery he advertised on an unregulated 500-kilowatt Mexican radio station that blasted country music from across the Rio Grande. Near the end of the century, testosterone therapy -- minus the goats -- had become less invasive but still was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

That changed in 1995, when the FDA approved a testosterone skin patch for men with a testosterone deficiency. AndroGel, a testosterone gel produced by Unimed Pharmaceuticals Inc., joined it on the market five years later.

The FDA's approvals opened the door for smart salesmen to sell testosterone and the idea of having low T to the masses. Sisk's wife had been injecting him in their kitchen, but he realized that wasn't the "best clinical answer." He got the idea for clinics dressed up as lounges, places that didn't resemble boring and sterile doctor's offices. He found a doctor to be his medical director and left his finance company to open his first Low T Center in Southlake in 2010.

From there, the business bloomed. Sisk says his average clinic sees about 75 men a day, and he's adding new ones almost weekly. Listening to him, Sisk's continued rise seems inevitable.

"Never in our lifetime has there been more 40- to 60-year-old men," he says. "Really, for the first time, men have really looked for ways to be healthy, and testosterone is just a part of that. The education of testosterone is, hey, if you have a lack of energy, gaining weight, losing muscle and you have low libido, you need to have your testosterone checked because that could be the culprit."

For some, the injections, which Sisk believes are safer than gels or pills, are covered by insurance. "It's just like going to your primary care doctor," he says. "If you don't have insurance or you have a high deductible, it's $395 a month."

It's a fantastic business model. Once a man begins replacing his testosterone, his natural ability to produce the hormone is dampened, so Sisk's patients come to his clinics every seven to 10 days for their shots.

Once he gets men in the door, Sisk has a captive audience, but he believes it's the little things, such as stereotypically male magazines and the clinics' decor, that bring men to him and the Low T Center, instead of GPs and other Dallas clinics that claim to boost testosterone.

"This is a non-sterile doctor's office, right?" Sisk asks. "The only place you've ever read Time was in a doctor's office. I got Sports Illustrated. I got Men's Health & Fitness. I got Car and Driver. I got magazines out there that are relevant to men, and they're current. I was in a dentist's office about six months ago reading about the St. Louis Rams winning the Super Bowl. Those were the magazines that they had out there. They just don't bother [with] the simple things. It's customer service 101."

Again, the cadence increases.

"If you look at health care, where health care really has screwed up, it isn't what happens inside that [examining] room," he says. "Rarely does a guy talk to his doctor and he has a bad experience. It's everything else that makes it a bad experience. It's the pissed-off front-desk girl. It's the terrible nurse. It's the poor building. It's all that process. That's what we are really good at. My docs are great docs, but the process is what makes this thing work so well."