Why though? I started taking Finasteride, and so far with zero side effects my hair loss completely stopped.
Costs basically nothing and I like my hair? I wish there wasn’t this stigma associated with it and I would have started sooner.
Costs basically nothing and I like my hair? I wish there wasn’t this stigma associated with it and I would have started sooner.
Unless you’ve had a lot of bloodwork and other testing done, it’s unlikely that you would know how you’ve been impacted by its side effects, and even if the impact to you is ultimately very minimal, a treatment that didn’t have these risks would be far superior.
Any exogenous hormone treatment (or treatment that interferes with the metabolism of hormones) is going to affect the natural functionality of your body in ways you probably don’t want it to. They’re all very risky and dependency forming. It’s almost not really true that these risks are side effects either, they’re just the expected outcomes of the treatment.
Taking moderate doses of steroids is also massively beneficial in many ways, with the worst of the side effects typically occurring if you stop taking them. But a lifelong dependency on a drug with a long list of adverse side effects is not a good thing, especially when ceasing treatment has its own long list of potential side effects.
Finasteride does suppress your natural testosterone production. If you intend to take it every day for the rest of your life, and are happy to gamble that you don’t get any of the other side effects, then maybe you’re happy taking that risk. But this is clearly not an ideal treatment, and I suspect most people who are prescribed it aren’t properly informed about these risks.
Hormone treatments are very scary, and I think people are far too casual about them. You usually take a hormone treatment to affect one thing that the hormone does, but it probably also does 100 other things that you might not want to interfere with, and those 100 other things probably also affect many other things downstream themselves. Your body probably also regulates production of that hormone in some way, so now you're also probably interfering with god knows what upstream from that hormone production. Some of these effects are well understood by medicine, but plenty of them aren't, and even for the ones that are, there's no way of predicting how you're going to react personally. They're a very blunt tool in that respect, and I think most people who take finasteride, or TRT, or birth control, or beta blockers, or even things like topical steroids aren't helped much to properly understand how they work, and all the ways the treatments can go wrong, including the ways that they can form dependencies on the treatment.
Neuroprotection by dihydrotestosterone in LPS-induced neuroinflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096999612....
Neuroprotection of dihydrotestosterone via suppression of the toll-like receptor 4/nuclear factor-kappa B signaling pathway in high glucose-induced BV-2 microglia inflammatory responses https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31876682/
After another 2 years of stopping I haven’t noticed my hair loss starting again.
At least in my case it’s like a miracle drug with minimal side effects.
It is hard to tell if what I am experiencing is a side effect of the finasteride unrelated to my T levels, or it is due to some reduction in the effects of testosterone because of the mechanism of action of the finasteride. If it is the latter, switching to injections and doing monotherapy to lower my T could have the same effects. The fact of the matter is the penis functions better with testosterone in my system but testosterone also leads to hair loss, so trying to get both is somewhat of an imperfect balancing act.
But hey, I'm having the best sex of my life and the people I am attracted to think I am hot as hell so I don't mind a little experimentation to see what works best! Actually its super cool what we can do with a little hormonal alchemy.
Also I’m 39, so whatever masculinization I’m due for I suspect has all happened already.
You are never going to supress T with just oral E.
> Also I’m 39, so whatever masculinization I’m due for I suspect has all happened already.
It never ends.
If you feel like finasteride isn't helping much try dutasteride instead.
Could be unlinked, but for me it just wasn't worth the risk.
You can find various articles of you search the web for this btw.
tl;dr While it can have undesirable side effects, these are long-term. But these side effects make it a powerful nocebo for some people to the point where they almost instantly get side effects (nausea, anxiety, sexual dysfunction), despite that being pharmacologically improbable.
I started dutasteride when I was 20 and have been on it for many years and it really stops hair loss, because my hair loss was very fast and aggressive.
Again, I've heard at least 5 of these first-hand, which is kind of wild for a drug I've probably only talked to 20 people about in total.
We're terrible at detecting changes over long periods of time. If anything I'd think long term users would be much more liable to bias.