Question: 

What is Oxytocin Used For?

Short Answer: 

The hormone oxytocin is available by prescription from compounding pharmacies. The most common uses for oxytocin is to enhance female libido and mood. Also, research has shown that oxytocin may also be helpful in weight loss. More research is needed to better understand how oxytocin can be used as an effective therapy for obesity.

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Dr. Maki: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Progress Your Health Podcast. I am Dr. Maki.

Dr. Davidson:  And I am Dr. Davidson. 

Dr. Maki: So on this episode, again, we are going to introduce something that we have used quite a bit with our patients. We are going to talk about a hormone, actually, a hormone prescription called oxytocin. I know a lot of people have heard of that before, right? It is considered to be kind of the love hormone. But it can be used, it can be turned into a prescription and we use it quite often. 

Dr. Davidson: Yeah. I have actually used it a lot with patients. When it works, it works really well and the great part to it is there is not any necessarily, negative side effects to it. So if it works, awesome. If it does not, then okay, we are back to the drawing board. Those of you that have heard of oxytocin, they think of it as like the love hormone. But it is. You know what, it can help with female libido and that is probably a cup. Probably the two reasons that we use it or I use it is for working on female libido because we know that that can be a tough one. Because school rules are complicated. The other part that I use it for is just a sense of well-being. It does kind of help bring up that mood. We live in a stressful world. We live in a sympathetic, adrenal fight-or-flight world, whether it is watching the news, or driving your car, or getting to work on time, or working with family, things are stressful that I find that oxytocin can really push you over to the other side to help bring that joy back so you do not always feel so rushed and overwhelmed. 

Dr. Maki: Yeah, right. I would agree that those are the two main things that you and I use it for. We are not really big fans of antidepressant medication in general. We never use them. That is fine if people want to take them, but we are not necessarily going to prescribe those things. That is just not what we choose to focus on. Oxytocin is kind of our version of something like that. It has very good, as we are talking about one of our previous episodes, the cost-benefit ratio oxytocin, also has a very good cost-benefit ratio. It works great. You get some benefit from it. There have been a few where they just do not notice anything or the effect of it is not substantial enough for them to notice any subjective improvement. Again, it is very subjective. Libido, maybe not as subjective either, your libido increases or it does not. The mood can also be kind of an up-and-down roller-coaster. There are good days and bad days that it can also be a hard thing to gauge or quantify over time if it is actually helpful or not. But the ones that it does, I had a patient to talk to earlier this week.