I too have high SHBG, so your post title caught my eye. I’ve been dealing with this problem for years and have tried several ways of dealing with it. Some more successful than others. I see there’s a lot of responses to your original post and I haven’t had time to read through them. So some of this might be repeat.
First off, a problem with high SHBG is that it make diagnosis difficult if you do not test for SHBG. In your case your doc did, so kudos to him. High SHBG can drive up total T because bound T is protected from liver metabolism. However, just because you have normal amounts of Total T, your free or bioavailable T can be pathetically low, as yours was.
I’ve tried every available OTC product to lower SHBG and the only thing they lowered was the level of my wallet. In short, they don’t work for guys with excessively elevated SHBG like you and me (mine is actually higher than yours).
You can lower it with very small doses of certain anabolic hormones, but getting a doctor to prescribe them off label can be difficult. In my own experiments, I’ve found both stanozolol (Winstrol) and oxandrolone (Anavar) to be extremely effective at lowering SHBG. In my experience, stanozolol is more effective than oxandrolone. I need about 2.5mg of stanasolole twice per day to effectively lower my SHBG into the normal range. With oxandrolone, I need double that amount (5mg 2X per day). Keep in mind that these are very low doses of the synthetic hormones compared to what bodybuilders use (40-100mg/day). There is criticism of these products as being toxic to the liver, but in my experience these low doses put less of a strain on the liver than OTC analgesics. Ibuprofen for example pushes my liver enzymes way further up.
Lately, I’ve taken a different approach to treating my low Free T and that is by not fighting to lower SHBG but rather jacking up Total T to the point where it overwhelms the SHBG protein so that enough T spills over to get Free T into the normal range. Here’s a graph of an experiment I ran through much of 2019. I used various doses of T-cyp and tested for Free T after 6 weeks of treatment at each dose. As you can see, I’m closing in on an optimal dose of 110mg/week T-cyp (split into 47mg every 3 days). This keeps my Free T into the range of a healthy 20-50 year old guy. I’m still working on the experiment and plan to have two more doses to report in the middle of the graph over the next couple months. This might alter the slope of the regression line.
You mentioned E2 and DIM. I’m not aware of any data that says T can interfere with T levels. This seems odd, particularly if you are on TRT. Instead, i suspect there was something odd with the lab itself. You might want to rerun it before making any drastic changes. A total T of 126 for a guy on TRT seems like an anomaly of the test.
Also, make sure you are using the correct E2 lab! Many doctors get this wrong and order the female test which will always come back high for guys because we are below the sensitivity of the assay and it reports anomalous high measurements. I STRONGLY suggest the LC/MS/MS test method rather than a direct antibody based test. There can be a lot of cross-reactivity with the direct method, even if it is designed as a sensitive test for men. The Endocrine society published a position paper on test methods and they recommend the LC/MS/MS test method (which is what I always use).