Finasteride Debilitating Side Effects...

[Roberto_72]

reclaim your lives from this terrible drug. I know I did, and I have met others who have.

I use 1.5 mg daily and at 45 I have daily morning wood. What can I say? Your mileage may vary.

 

[hairblues]

I use 1.5 mg daily and at 45 I have daily morning wood. What can I say? Your mileage may vary.

As @buckthorn would say
...Wasup?

 

[buckthorn]

I have daily morning wood.

sup boo? Wuz good?

 

[buckthorn]

Hey everyone, I am writing this to share how I got through my finasteride experience. I took 1.25 mg daily for 6 months and started to get a lot of different symptoms so I stopped and like many people here had a terrible experience getting off of it. No capacity for an erection, pounding, racing heart, mood swings, depression, anxiety. Of course reading the website didn't help! I spiraled into a terrible time of fear and terror, just like many of you here.

But I made it though and am now fully able to have erections, good sex, normal heart rate, and feel fully healthy again - in fact more healthy than I ever have in my life. And I want to share a little bit about it in case it might be at all helpful for anyone.

First of all, what I realized is that nothing has to be permanent. No symptoms are necessarily permanent. I truly believe any of you can recover and be able to have erections again, or healthy mind and body. I truly believe this. The fact is that the mind is very powerful and can influence the body and its symptoms. That is the entire premise of how the placebo effect works - if we are convinced we are doomed and can never get healthy again, that actually has a strong impact on our capacity to heal and recover. The mental and psychological factors are huge.

Secondly - listen, finasteride is a powerful substance. It is a chemical/hormone that affects the entire body, but especially the liver and kidneys - the organs of the body that are responsible for cleansing/filtering the body of toxins. If you are someone who is sensitive, this is especially true. And when you detox from Finasteride your whole system goes into a long process of re-equilibrizing, restoring itself and its natural balances. So you need to support that, and support the bodies natural methods of recalibrating, cleansing, and detoxing.

To be honest, I used to be skeptical of simple, holistic methods, I only used medications and strong western methods. But because I became so anxious (I got anti-anxiety medication to help with heart palpitations and anxiety) I finally tried seeing different doctors who helped me understand what actually was happening in my system, and how to help my body detox and start to heal and recover.

I took supplements like Milk Thistle (which helps flush the liver and aids in detoxing all the toxins that got stored up), Dandelion Root (also good for detoxing), and Vitamin D and Magnesium. Most Americans (up to 50% are deficient in both vitamin D and magnesium, and they are essential, crucial for healthy body systems, especially for someone coming off of finasteride and who's body is in serious flux). Magnesium also helped me with my erections. I also started a good multi-vitamin, started taking fish oil, priobiotics, etc...

I also did acupuncture, therapy, and using a sauna to detox. I also read Dave Asprey's book The BulletProof Diet, and David Perlmutter's book Grain Brain, and began a low-carb and high-fat diet. It really helps, I promise! After 6 months I got so much better - I was able to begin having erections, felt calmer, less anxious and much more sane. After 9 months, and then for sure after a year, I was 100% back to my old self. I can have the best erections I have ever had, feel much better.

I am fully convinced that all of you can get better, and reclaim your lives from this terrible drug. I know I did, and I have met others who have. I am telling you, read those books, get on a clean diet, take good care of your bodies, DRINK A LOT OF WATER, with lemon juice in it, which really helps the liver cleanse and detox, take some milk thistle and good supplements, and all of this will help your body naturally re-equilibrize and recover and heal. Also important is to get emotional support from friends, family, therapist, etc.. I needed to reach out and ask for help, and that is ok. In fact it can really help.

I hope this might be helpful to some of you - just remember, it may look dark and bleak, but trust me, it will pass, and there is always light around the corner, and ways forward towards health and healing.

dude, can you summarize this into two sentences? I am going to have a f*****g stroke.

 

[abcdefg]

The sexual sides wouldnt bother me at all, but gyno or mental sides if they were severe enough would not have been worth it. Your going to have millions of questions with no answers if you take it and are unlucky to get this PFS assuming it exists. No one knows anything about this stuff to fix any of it.
If you break your endocrine system its basically GG. There is no way to fix any of it because no one understands how any of it works since its different by person. It takes 10 years to make a new drug so it all moves super slowly too

 

[buckthorn]

I still have drastically INCREASED libido from finasteride, but I can't really talk about that on here without getting made fun of... and of course, I understand why. But... it's f*****g TERRIBLE. Oily skin, erections all through the night with no vagina to put them in because the crawling itchy termites that now reside in my scalp have destroyed my hair and left me so mentally fucked that my eye literally twitches sometimes.

I am NOT saying that this is as bad as losing your libido. I am NOT comparing them at all. I am just trying to demonstrate the variety of ways that finasteride can just f*** YOUR f*****g SOUL FOREVER!!!!

 

[hairblues]

dude, can you summarize this into two sentences? I am going to have a f*****g stroke.

40 characters or less please.

 

[pjhair]

I still have drastically INCREASED libido from finasteride, but I can't really talk about that on here without getting made fun of... and of course, I understand why. But... it's f*****g TERRIBLE. Oily skin, erections all through the night with no vagina to put them in because the crawling itchy termites that now reside in my scalp have destroyed my hair and left me so mentally fucked that my eye literally twitches sometimes.

I am NOT saying that this is as bad as losing your libido. I am NOT comparing them at all. I am just trying to demonstrate the variety of ways that finasteride can just f*** YOUR f*****g SOUL FOREVER!!!!

Buck, I think you had the same reaction to finasteride as me. Massive shed, oily skin, scalp pimple etc. All markers of increased testosterone. Takin finasteride is only going to make it worse. Topical spironolactone is a nice alternative as it doesn't cause increase in testosterone levels.

 

[Grasshüpfer]

Hey buck, you probably just want to give a sh*t, but did you ever have your levels tested?

But maybe spironolactone does something. I'm also aware that you basically tried everything, but I can't find the thread where you kept track.

 

[Afro_Vacancy]

@Thomas1284 , thank you for sharing.

Can you give a full list of your supplements, your dosage and schedule, and whether or not you think it helped? Are there some you think we're useless?

 

[sunchyme1]

@pjhair , are you using topical spironolactone? I had the exact same reaction to finasteride as you and @buckthorn so I have been reading your posts with interest. I have used topical spironolactone years ago to no avail, but I was using lots of other stuff at the time, desperately trying to undo the finasteride side-effects which destroyed my hair.

f*** me 2004 your a veteran man

when did u use finasteride? did u recover from the sides?

whats your hair loss regimen now?

 

[pjhair]

@pjhair , are you using topical spironolactone? I had the exact same reaction to finasteride as you and @buckthorn so I have been reading your posts with interest. I have used topical spironolactone years ago to no avail, but I was using lots of other stuff at the time, desperately trying to undo the finasteride side-effects which destroyed my hair.

Did you have increase shedding or oilier hair on spironolactone? I haven't commenced spironolactone yet. Being burnt from finasteride has made me extremely cautios. I want to visit a doctor and get my hair mapped out for miniaturization before I start any treatment. A possible strategy for people like us is to use meds that don't cause increase in testosterone and simply bind to androgen receptors blocking the DHT access to folicles. spironolactone does that and so does RU. Since you didn't have any gain on sprio, why don't you try RU? Many users have reported positive result on that.

If I remember correctly @Dench57 got similar side effects from finasteride. Dench, do you have any recommendation?

 

[pjhair]

I can't really recall any effects from using topical spironolactone, either positive or negative (this was almost 10 years ago). It definitely didn't help with reducing shedding. It might have increased it but I was shedding tons of hair anyway. It didn't give me any of the hyperandro side-effects as finasteride did (terrible acne, painful scalp inflammation, etc).

I have in fact tried RU recently, which unfortunately was a disaster - pretty much like bucktorn reported as well. A significant increase in shedding (late sept '16 I still had okay'ish coverage, by late november my hair looked terrible, and still does), acne on scalp and face and sore spots on my scalp where the shedding seems to have hit the hardest. I sincerely hope to recover some of the lost hair on RU.

I have tried just about any hair loss treatment and supplement available in the last 10+ years, trying to stop the relentless hair loss brought on by finasteride. The only thing that has helped me was a combination of copper peptides (Folligen spray) and plain old 5% minoxidil (Kirkland). I am back on these now.

Seems like your body is reacting negatively to a wide range of anti-androgens. Since I had similar effect as you on finasteride, RU should trigger similar side effects on me as well. I think the hormone changes that can help us are the ones that bring down testesterone and increase estrogen. Estrogen is used to treat acne anyway so that should help us. But as we are males, messing with female hormones like estrogen is fraught with danger. Sprio should have helped with oily hair/acne/shedding but you may require a stronger dose which is dangerous for males. The fact that topical spironolactone didn't increase your acne and hair oiliness means your body was probably fine with it.