one reason to see a Doctor
one in a million people have a genetic condition where either their thyroid or liver is not working right and the need to metabolize finasteride can be too much of a burden and give them problems. usually these problems develop in over 6 months. doctors usually like to do a blood test after 4 or 6 months on the drug to see if everything is ok. if it is, you don't need the test again.
finasteride looks like teststosterone, but has a few chemical groups on it that make it hormonally inert so that it does not interfer with your body. it is metabolised in the liver just like testosterone and DHT are. DHT is just testosterone with an extra hydrogen on it. an enzyme in your follicles (and many other parts of the body) grabs testosterone out of the blood supply and turns it to DHT, which is much more potent than testosterone for hair loss. some DHT leaks out of the cell into the blood and makes "serum DHT." the vast majority of DHT that damages the follicle is made by the follicle, and does not come from the leaks elsewhere in the body. finasteride looks like testosterone, but does not bind to the androgen receptor, and instead gets stuck in the enzyme 5ar2. normally the enzyme changes one testosterone molecule after another, but finasteride gets stuck in it and stops it, and the two stuck together go off to the liver to be metabolised. It take a few days for the cell to make more 5ar2, and within hours the DHT leaks out of the cell and is metabolised by the liver. Since the testosterone was not turned in to DHT, the testosterone levels are now 3% higher than they would have been. the liver will metabolize all the finasteride in your body in just over a day.
you can take enough asprin to kill yourself, but you can't afford enough finasteride to kill yourself, and would have to eat many many bottles at once. side effects occure in people who can't handle low DHT levels. You have to take a lot of finasteride to inhibit a little more DHT, and could probably handle 20mg per day, though maybe 5% or 10% of people would get side effects at this dose. Even avodart, which reduces dht levels to 1/3 the level finasteride dose, has a low side effect profile.
study this graph closely.
http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/430/2006 ... _chart.gif
notice how the people who got on propecia and back off for a year and back on catch up with the people who were always on it, and the people who start a year late never catch up. And look at the people who are always on placebo. 277 hairs is half your hair density. I card people for alcohol regularly and see that the hair in the pictures does not match the hair on the heads. 6 months is enough time to loose half your hair when it really starts taking off. the younger you are, the more aggressive you hair loss will be. you have to work a lot harder than men who start loosing it in their 30's. The reason men gain hair in the first year is all the hairs that can survive at the reduced DHT levels start to thrive, when they were smaller. The reason hair loss continues after 2 years is genetics keeps making your hair more sensitive to DHT every year, progressively, and propecia only lowers DHT a fixed amount. Most people's genetics are not too bad, but if your's tells your hair to get really sensitive, you will depend on early treatment with minoxidil and spironolactone and nizoral and copper peptides and SODs. Just get the nizoral, minoxidil, and propecia for not, and research the others later. buy propecia online now to start early, and get a prescription later when you decide to. don't waste time. your hair is still thick.
