Today’s quick tip is especially for newbies and will help you reduce the pain of your intramuscular injections.
A common mistake that those new to testosterone replacement therapy make is not changing needles before injecting.
I made this mistake myself when I first started out. You use the same needle to draw the testosterone from the vial as you do to inject it.
The problem with this isn’t always obvious to beginners.
When you draw the testosterone from the vial, the needle may get blunt as you stick it through the vial’s rubber seal, and pull it out again.
The needle is no longer as sharp as it should be, so when you use it to inject it into your skin and muscle, it is a lot more painful going in due to this bluntness.
To get around this, simply use a new needle for injecting your testosterone. Use one needle for drawing, and then swap that needle for a new one for injecting. You’ll be glad you did.
There are a couple of cases where this wouldn’t really be an issue:
- You use different size needles, in which case you would swap anyway.
- Your testosterone comes in an ampoule, not a vial. So when you draw the testosterone, there is no rubber seal that the needle has to go through, and it doesn’t get blunt. Provided you make sure that you don’t scrape the bottom of the ampoule with the needle, which may blunt it.
What Does The Science Say?
Swapping needles has also been proven to significantly reduce pain during intramuscular injections in a randomised controlled study.
The Journal of Advanced Nursing Study published a paper in 2010 titled “Effect on pain of changing the needle prior to administering medicine intramuscularly: a randomised controlled trial”.
The results of this paper concluded that changing the needle prior to administering the medicine significantly reduced pain intensity. You can view that study here.
Hopefully this little tip saves those of you that are new to TRT a lot of pain in future.
If it did, please let me know in the comments.
