The invention relates to methods to treat specified clinical disorders such as hyperglycemia, type 2 diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis. The invention also provides methods to identify and characterize drugs, which are characterized in part by eliciting a variable biologic or therapeutic effect on a biomolecule at one time and relative normalization of the biomolecule at another time point. Compounds include 17±-ethynylandrost-5-ene-3², 7², 17²-triol or androst-5-ene-3², 4², 16±, 17²-tetrol, which can be used as reference standards to facilitate assessing and characterizing such candidate drugs.
