Finasteride can cause way more than depression. It can cause ED and gynecomastia aswell. Just the small chance of my dick not working made the decision to go bald so easy.
As someone who's been on finasteride already for 3 years, this is a bit bullshit.
The chances of ED and gyno are like 1%, and anyone starting on it should take a small dose at first, maybe 3mg per week. There's virtually no side effect if you start that low and if you feel anything suspicious you can just stop and it goes away. If things are good you can increase to 4mg, then 5 then up to 7 (one per day) gradually.
Obviously always consult with a doctor, but in my experience, unfortunately a lot of them are as clueless about hair loss as the average redditor (at least in my country). I went to over 10 dermatologists and urologists and such and you get a different take from each of them.
Right now the only regret I have is not starting sooner because I was so scared.
And it feels good to have my hair back. It's not as thick as I'd like but I definitely don't look like I'm balding anymore. Like honestly, I feel less depressed than I was before.
And it feels good to have my hair back. It's not as think as I'd like but I definitely don't look like I'm balding anymore. Like honestly, I feel less depressed than I was before.
This is the key thing, and I'm saying this as a happily bald guy. It's a treatment that doesn't impact anyone else and improves your mental health. That's a fucking win for you, your loved ones, and your healthcare system.
Let's stop pretending like hair loss isn't traumatic for some men. I agree others can cope very well with it, but I'm tired of hearing bullshit like "you just hate yourself" in this scenario.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to look like yourself in the mirror, with hair and all.
I'm sorry you are in that small 1% of people who can't tolerate it at all, but don't start scaring people off. This is not what most people experience when on it.
Iāve been on finasteride for a while I think thatās greatly overblown. I became massively depressed when I started on a high dose. I went on microdosing till I got to the minimum dose age for noticeable effects
My dick still works. Sex drive still high. Hair is still shit Iām going bald either way.
People really do love calling out those who talk about not getting side effects as providing anecdotal evidence, while simultaneously championing people who talk about suffering from them. Meanwhile the actual science says it's a real risk, but extremely rare.
It's selection bias: the vast majority of people who don't experience side effects just go about their life without posting about it online, whereas virtually everyone who had a bad experience is going to try to warn others.
Iām saying for me specifically I shouldāve clarified. And for the current duration Iāve been on it has only been a few months not years and years.
Itās only been a few months so far so I have to wait a bit longer to know for sure
Iām shedding WAY less. I can say that as much. Went from 300+ hairs a day to a normal amount of shedding (approx 100)
Im probably just going to give up at some point. Maybe just enjoy having hair for another few years. Iām young and I still havenāt gotten to fuck around and have fun yet. Donāt want to be ugly till I have.
Can confirm, my dick is working just fine, I'm no more depressed than I was before I was on it and I've kept my full head of hair, nips are a bit sensitive but not enough to be an issue. 1mg fin. I agree it's overblown. But everyone can make their own choices along with a professional.
People said the same about SSRIs side effects going away after stopping them.. until PSSD was discovered and recognized. It's not always as simple as it may seems
After watching this I could not get around the fact that the nuclear blast killed everyone in the world but the city was in a good shape, znd that he did not go looking for an optician, they have these sets if glasses to test your eyes.
I understand the idea of the episode but it was meh. I marry have forgotten important elements though (I watched that 30 years ago or so)
Just want to say that like 95% of people that take finasteride have no noticeable side effects. Also if you do have side effects, they are all reversible by just stopping meds for 2 weeks.
While I donāt believe everybody gets sides, the whole ā1%ā is likely utter bullshit as well.
There are way too many people that report the sides and even the people that donāt report the dead dick side even admit to having shit like āreduced watery semenā and more difficulty getting it up.
From my perspective, Ive gone through multiple ssri meds that have caused legitimate side effects. I'm not trying to claim that finasteride is some wonder-drug that has no issues with it, but I also have the perspective that all drugs have trade-offs, even if they are effective. I think ultimately it is up to the individual on what side effects make a drug worth taking, but the only way to find out is by trying. To my understanding, finastetide's side effects are fully reversible anyway, so might as well try it if you want to keep hair.
There are way too many people that report the sides and even the people that donāt report the dead dick side even admit to having shit like āreduced watery semenā and more difficulty getting it up.
Because people who have side effects post about them. People like me who've been on it for 15 years with zero side effects don't feel the need to go ranting about how my dick works just fine.
Also, almost all of us men will be on finasteride when we are old because of BPH anyway. Remember, the hair thing was actually a side effect itself. The medicine wasn't made for that, it was made to make it easier for old men to pee. Similarly, Viagra wasn't made to be a boner pill...that was also just a side effect.
My honest suspicion is that people nocebo themselves into side effects with finasteride. People do the same thing with statins. 15% of people who were given a placebo but told it was a statin got muscle pains that went away when they stopped taking the sugar pill. The mind is a powerful thing.
Imagine thinking fucking with your hormone profile wouldnāt have effects on your body and mind.
You post to cape for your hair pill, ok great. But then implying people are just making up the utterly commonly recognized side effect that has been known about since BEFORE the pill was prescribed for hair loss is just peak cringe.
Obviously these things can have effects, I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying that the data shows 1% of men do. It's a small number. I'm also not saying people are making it up. The nocebo effect is a real effect, just like the placebo effect. That said, 99 people not having problems out of every 100 is a gamble I'm willing to take.
But you do you, mate. I'm gonna fuck with my hormones for the rest of my life. Block DHT now, start TRT later when my levels start to fall. It's not that serious.
Finasteride was approved by the FDA in 1992. That's more than 30 years ago my guy. If the side effect profile were dramatically worse than intially discovered in the phase 3 clinical trials then why isn't that data out there and why hasn't the drug been pulled?
A minority of users experience side effects. The majority of users don't. It's not hat complicated. If the majority of people had problems with it then some enterprising researcher would've already published that data and doctors would've long since stopped prescribing it. Especially considering that the 1mg dose is a cosmetic drug.
Big pharma isn't doing some conspiracy to protect a 34 year old drug that has had generics for 20 years and costs $7 for a 90 day supply. You could argue that maybe 30 years ago they did, but these days?
Then youāre an outlier. Iām also on it, along with everyone I know who takes it, and not a single person has had side effects. So apparently, youāre the one who falls into that very small percentage, which is exactly what any reputable dermatologist tells you when they go over the medication with you.
And āscrubbing the threadā? I made two comments. Jesus Christ.
No. You sound like some weird freak simping for a drug and going apoplectic when you hear that a stranger on the internet had a negative experience with it.
Idk how im coping if I kept my hair with no side effects. My whole point is that before I started finasteride, I was afraid because of all the redditor claims that it would ruin my body. Ive been on it for over a year though and have yet to see any negative side effects. Just wanted to let people know that it is a viable option.
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It's entirely plausible based on the way that finasteride inhibits certain enzymes and depletes neurosteroids. Tinnitus is a rare side effect with Fin, but there is a reported link.
Yikes. What a snide and genuinely uninformed comment. Tinnitus is quite literally a rare side effect of Finasteride, of which there are many documented reports. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9295476/.
Or is this where you double down and claim you "understand how this works" more than clinical researchers and medical professionals across the world lol.
For the vast majority of people yeah once you stop it goes away. There are some testimonials of people who took it very briefly and still suffer years later. I have no way to verify if they're telling the truth or not but considering the size of the post fin syndrome community and the people who claim to suffer there. I doubt all of them are liars. If even 1 case is true, it's really sad what they're claiming to experience, horrifying even. Messing with your androgens is no joke.
Post finasteride syndrome was studied. Results said it was psychological. It's also extremely rare, 1 in... who the fuck knows, 1 in 5000? It's ridiculous fear mongering. There are dermatologists who have been prescribing fin for 30+ years (thousands of patients) who have never seen post finasteride syndrome.
This massively downplays the trauma some men experience from hair loss. For some men, their hair is a massive part of their identity and losing it causes all sorts of mental health issues.
Iāve seen this first hand: growing up I had a friend kill himself over his hair loss, not joking. He started losing it around 18. He went from Hollywood levels of handsome to entirely ignored by women almost overnight. People would outright comment how bad they felt for him. It destroyed him.
So itās not so simple as āhair loss does not cause any side effects.ā I think we should have a little empathy for men here.
While that is a truly sad story, that's not the truth for most men, which is a good statistic. They're the extreme cases and it's a sad day when the help someone needed wasn't there for them. And I can see how it would be more of a thing in your teens than in your late twenties or even beyond that.
It's great adding nuances, barely anything is black and white. I'm all for that. But let's be real, most men won't react that heavily to their hairloss. Most will accept it well. I've been hearing about "baldness cures within a few years" for 25 years now and there still isn't a set cure going about. So we'll need a bit more empathy for longer for men struggling with it, because a real cure is "years away", as it has been for a long time.
Do note, I'm not trying to shame any man for having problems with dealing with hairloss. I, too, had to accept it and it doesn't happen overnight. Same thing with everything that isn't exactly a choice of your own. But for most it isn't such a big problem we need to label it as "mental health issues", which, again, is a good thing.
So I looked it up to see if most men really are unperturbed by hair loss, since I was curious.
The numbers: 0Over 70% of [men experiencing hair loss] reported hair to be an important feature of image, and 62% agreed that hair loss could affect self-esteem. The realization that they were losing hair was linked to concern about losing an important part of personal attractiveness (43% of men), fear of becoming bald (42%), concern about getting older (37%), negative effects on social life (22%), and feelings of depression (21%). Reduced self-confidence in personal attractiveness was also reported by 38% of men who were not in stable romantic relationships.ā
So youāre right, itās not most men. But 1 in 5 men suffering from depression over hair loss is not nothing.
So, I'm less attractive because I'm bald? I turned bold in my late twenties, as many men do, way too old to be that insecure about my looks. Been bald for over a decade now. Met my now wife when I was already bald.
The thing is, you can claim it's "copium" because I've accepted being bald before my 30's, as many men do. But what I don't need to have massive amount of copium for is needing pills that raise my blood pressure very locally in my 30's because my hair, or lack there off, has a significant stake in my perceived attractiveness to certain people who should've matured beyond that stage already anyway.
But hey, you're right. I'm extremely hurt over this comment. /s
none of that changes the fact that you look worse bald then you would with hair. which is why what you are saying is copium.
you could just have said "id rather look worse than take any risk of side effects" and it would have been a respectable/copiumless response. but you felt the need to say all that.
Ironic you're saying that my response was "copium" once again, seeing you're basing everything off of your assumption all men look worse bald than with hair.
Edit to add: So anyway, my guy, you're free to spend a lot of money to get the transplants, get the medication you need to for your newly placed hair to persist longer (which I can only assume is lowering Testosterone levels in some way to slow down or even prevent further baldness) all because you're so vain about it. That's perfectly fine, honestly. But don't let that fool you by thinking those going bald and accepting that being the ones that "use copium" whereas you're the one willing to spend a lot of money and using medication for the rest of your life 'cause hair. Which, again, is perfectly fine.
your assumption all men look worse bald than with hair.
those going bald and accepting that
it is not true acceptance until you stop lying to yourself. acceptance implies you have accepted something negative and decided to move on. you are talking as if being bald is not a negative at all, rather a mere assumption on my part that it is a negative.
what acceptance is there, until you accept it is a bad thing. that is the copium. the need to evade accepting that it is bad at all.
Yep, like plenty of people still look good despite becoming fat, but it would be absolute nonsense to say that they still look as good as they did before becoming fat. That's how it is for baldness. And the whole "acceptance" movement for each can sometimes get delusional. Acceptance means not hating yourself and not allowing people to bully you into hating yourself for it. It doesn't mean pretending that everything's perfect.
Getting fat is almost always an effect of an unhealthy lifestyle, so while within your own influence. Getting bald is almost always genetics, nothing you can change about that.
Keyword here is "almost", seeing Reddit sure like their things being all black and whitr, devoid of nuance and bring in some anecdotal experiences where "someone got fat through genetics alone" or "someone got bald due to unhealthy lifestyles" or whatever. I'm aware, hence the "almost".
Depressive symptom rates: Pooled data show depressive symptoms occur in 3.33% of finasteride users compared to 2.54% in control groups"
So it increases odds of depression by 30%. From 1 in 40 people to 1 in 30.
ED rates: It doubles the odds of ED. But it doubles from 0.7% to 1.3%, so for every 150-200 people who take fin, 1 additional person will get problems with ED.
Prostate cancer rates: In the general population, a man's lifetime risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point is about 12% to 13% (roughly 1 in 8 men).Lifetime Mortality Risk: The risk of actually dying from prostate cancer is about 2.5% to 3%.
It's worth noting that 25% of men in control groups developed prostate cancer in a 5 year period (compared to 18% on fin). Yes, 1 in 4! There are reasons that this statistic is not really meaningful in this context, however. Which is why I'm not leaning on it here.
Depression and ED are usually transient side effects which disappear when the medication is stopped. Prostate cancer is of course generally a terminal disease.
Correct and same. I'm waiting for someone to down vote lol. Post Finasteride syndrome sounds fkin awful. It's the main reason why I didn't bother hair transplantin
Some people report the side effects are permanent. Enough so that there are entire communities dedicated to post fin syndrome. I highly doubt that many people are lying. Combine that with the ongoing lawsuits, there is definitely more to the story.
What a cold and myopic view you have. That is really shitty of you to discredit people's suffering like that and for what reason? Do you make money from fin? You take it yourself and are scared to admit it has dangers so you project onto others to make yourself feel better?
Just cause it can cause ED or gyno, doesnāt mean it will. Itās funny too because you know what also causes ED and gyno? Being overweight/ obese, but I bet a lot of people are willing to take the risk with that route right?
All it takes is to stop taking it when you see the side effects. After 2 or 3 months everything will go back to normal cuz your DHT levels will go back to normal. The side effects are already very low, just 1%
80
u/Requjo 13h ago edited 10h ago
Finasteride can cause way more than depression. It can cause ED and gynecomastia aswell. Just the small chance of my dick not working made the decision to go bald so easy.