Human growth hormone: injecting it, or stimulating your own

The medical uses, which are real and well established

Somatropin is approved in Canada and the US for growth hormone deficiency in adults and children, several paediatric growth disorders (Turner syndrome, Prader-Willi, small-for-gestational-age children who do not catch up), HIV-associated wasting, and short bowel syndrome. In genuine deficiency it is transformative rather than incremental — this is replacing something a body actually cannot make.

Diagnosing adult deficiency is deliberately rigorous: stimulation testing, not a single low reading, because GH is pulsatile and a random draw between pulses looks like deficiency in a healthy person. That distinction — a diagnosed deficiency versus an age-related decline everyone has — is the line the rest of this section sits on.

Why people use it without that diagnosis

The longevity case is that age-related decline is itself a deficiency, just a universal one, and that restoring youthful levels restores youthful tissue. It traces largely to a small 1990 study in older men that reported gains in lean mass and losses in fat — a paper that launched an industry and whose own journal later published an editorial cautioning against exactly the use it was being cited for.

Alongside that: athletes and bodybuilders for recovery and body composition, and a broader group chasing sleep quality, skin, and the general sense of resilience that fades. Body composition does genuinely change. What is much less established is whether the things people actually want — feeling better, functioning better, living longer — follow, and there is a real counter-argument in the other direction: lower IGF-1 signalling is associated with longer life across a number of species, which is an awkward fact for the longevity pitch.

The legal position is stricter than people expect

In the US, human growth hormone is not a controlled substance — it sits outside that schedule entirely, which sounds permissive and is not. It has its own dedicated provision instead: distributing HGH for any purpose other than an approved indication is a federal felony carrying up to five years, doubling for distribution to a minor.

The detail that surprises people: the FDA reads "distribution" as including writing the prescription. The ordinary off-label latitude that covers most of medicine does not apply here in the same way. This is the single biggest reason anti-aging clinics offer peptides instead — not better evidence, just a statute that does not name them.

Canada has no equivalent HGH-specific criminal provision; somatropin is a prescription drug under the ordinary rules. Buying it online from outside that system is a different problem — unverified product, no recourse, and counterfeit GH is common enough to be the default assumption rather than the exception.

The rationale, stated fairly — because it is a good one

Rather than supplying the hormone, these send the signal that makes your pituitary release its own. The argument for it is genuinely sound in principle: your release comes in natural pulses, mostly overnight, with the feedback loop intact — so there is a ceiling your body still controls. Injected GH overrides that and holds a flat level the system never sees naturally.

More physiological, self-limiting, and in principle safer. That is a mechanistic argument, and it is where most of these part company with the evidence: a good reason to expect something is not the same as a demonstration that it happened.

There are two different switches, which is why some get sold in pairs

Your pituitary responds to two separate signals. GHRH, from the hypothalamus, is the accelerator. Ghrelin — the same hormone involved in hunger — acts on a different receptor and also triggers release, partly by suppressing the brake. They are independent inputs, so hitting both at once produces a larger pulse than either alone.

That is the whole logic behind "CJC-1295 + ipamorelin" being sold as a unit: one from each column. It is a sound piece of physiology. It is also the point at which two unapproved compounds become one unstudied combination.

GHRH analogues — the accelerator

Ghrelin mimetics — the other switch

What tesamorelin proves about the whole category

This is the most useful thing on the page, even if tesamorelin itself is irrelevant to you. It is mechanistically the same class as sermorelin and CJC-1295 — a GHRH analogue prompting your own pituitary. The difference is not the mechanism, the molecule type, or anything intrinsic. The difference is that somebody ran the trials: 816 patients, a defined endpoint, a regulator that read the data.

So "it's only a peptide, it just nudges your own hormone" is not a reason something cannot be studied and approved. One of them was. The others have not been — and that is a statement about evidence, not about the category.

The corollary cuts the other way too, and it is the part most worth being clear about: tesamorelin is approved for visceral fat in HIV-associated lipodystrophy. Not for aging, not for body composition in healthy adults, not for recovery, not for training. An approval for one indication is not a general endorsement, and no Canadian or US physician is prescribing Egrifta for the gym — it does not fit the indication and it is expensive enough that nobody would try.

Which leads to the thing that actually matters here: the tesamorelin people buy from peptide vendors is not Egrifta. It is unregulated material with the same name. The approval belongs to a specific manufactured product that went through trials — it does not transfer to a vial from a research-chemical site any more than a trial result transfers to it. So tesamorelin's presence on this page is an argument about what the category could be if studied, not a green light on what is being sold.

"But a clinic prescribed it"

People genuinely are prescribed CJC-1295, ipamorelin and sermorelin by licensed practitioners. In the US the route is 503A compounding — a real regulated channel, but an exemption FROM the approval process rather than a form of it. Canada is stricter and Health Canada has named CJC-1295 and ipamorelin in its unauthorised-peptide warning. Either way, a prescription is a practitioner's decision, not a finding that anything was assessed. The full picture is on its own page: how unapproved drugs get prescribed in Canada.

There is one tell worth recognising here specifically. If a clinic offers you secretagogues but will not prescribe growth hormone itself, that is not a clinical judgement that the peptides are better — it is the statute. HGH carries a federal criminal provision covering exactly these uses; the peptides do not. The choice is being made by legal exposure, not by evidence — and the evidence for the peptides is thinner than for the hormone. A clinic that explains it that honestly is worth more of your trust than one presenting it as the superior protocol.

Sermorelin causes particular confusion because it was once an approved drug, which makes it sound more legitimate than its shelf-mates. It was withdrawn commercially, and the version compounded today is not the approved product any more than vendor tesamorelin is Egrifta.