very interesting stuff Blunted. glad to hear that it is workign for your sleeping. another recommendation i have for you for your sleep is glutamine before you goto sleep. i found that gluatmine is a major pre cursor to GABA and does help sleep. check out whole foods for it to buy it, it’s a powder supplement.
also, what exercises are you doing? yoga type stuff? are you going to a physical therapist and they are tellign yuo exercises to do?
tahnks for the update man!
Blunted, we’ve previously had some disagreement about the extent of the merits of exercise in PFS sufferers. I’ve found that regardless of my exercise routine/attempts (I am a former athlete) the muscles do not respond in a pattern of recovery and growth as they did prior to finasteride. I suffer from the same types of muscoskeletal problems where the muscles are too weak to keep the joints in alignment. I’m responding because I’m surprised that you still have a posture such as this if you’re MMA training and have packed on muscle? Are you still able to keep up with the training routine that you had previously?
Benzos are highly addictive and lose their effect after a short while, please be aware of this before you take them again.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine_dependence
It’s been a long time again since my last post, I’ve been enjoying the summer mostly. I’ll take some time to update once more and tell you guys how fucking great I feel.
For me the process of building muscle and recovery has also changed compared to how I was prior to finasteride. What is quite unusual though is for me it’s completely the other way. Whereas most people seem to suffer from muscle wastage and inability to exercise, I now build muscle more quickly, have increased strength and a very short recovery time from training. I can start a workout routine for any given sport to have sore muscles the day after. Only after my first session of a certain routine though, every training session I have after that workout will then result in rapid increased stength and never any muscle soreness ever again (unless I start a new workout schedule of course).
To give you an example. Not too long ago I started doing the jefferson squat in my weightlifting routine (example video: youtube.com/watch?v=Kk0aAaBPc40). The first time I tried it I had major sore muscles the days after, as any normal person would have. The next session I did this exercise though I could lift way heavier and never again did I have sore muscles from the exercise at any time whatsoever. My fitness instructor, a competing bodybuilder himself as well as a steroid user, told me he had never seen anything like that. First of all I can outlift him by a whole lot. And secondly, the recovery period I have is nothing he has ever seen in his years of bodybuilding and the experience (second and first hand) he has with steroids. We’re pretty close, but I never told him about taking finasteride. Needless to say, he knows something unusual is going on with me hormonally as he jokingly said I was secretly taking steroids behind his back with me not telling him about it, because that could be the only reason to explain it.
The poor posture I mentioned is something I’ve always had in my life though and never caused me to have any problems. I can only theorize the muscle loss I experienced shortly after crashing may have worsened this already poor posture and caused even greater muscle imbalance. I’ve never had musculoskeletal problems as you describe myself where the muscles are too weak to keep the joints properly aligned. For me it’s always been muscle imbalance, quite possibly a result of existing poor posture and weightraining that targets the wrong muscles to cause further problems. For my knees it was related to this where my inner leg muscles outpowered the outer leg muscles (for the lack of correct terms, it’s be a long while since I’ve been treated for this hehe) and thus yanking the knee out of proper allignment as it’s being used. As stated before there was no muscle weakness involved for me and proper strenghtening of the right muscles has fixed this. It’s quite a common injury soccer players have actually. Same sort of thing I see happening a lot when people work out with too much focus on the chest and don’t train the shoulders enough. These people usually get the same sort of problems with their shoulder.
And yes I can still keep up with my previous training routines, in fact I’ve only gotten stronger and stronger and have stepped up my training regimen. Besides weight lifting I am still actively kickboxing which I’m now better at than I’ve ever been in my life before in terms of cardio, technique and punching & kicking power. In fact my trainer thinks I’m ready to get in the ring, in his words I’d be an A level fighter within a year if I started competing. I’m pretty proud of that since he’s a former world champion himself, coming from him that means a lot. And also the fact I can still pull this off with PFS means a great deal to me. I’m currently not competing though seeing as how I don’t want to step in the ring until I’ve recovered.
If anything all the working out and doing sports have helped me out greatly, perhaps more so than anything else, ever since acquiring PFS. First of all it gave me something to focus on when I was totally depressed and at a point in my life where I was completely lost. As I started noticing I was making progress it also restored my self confidence. Not only did I start feeling better both mentally and physically, I also regained faith in my own body, knowing I am able to overcome this and that I will recover.
I can honestly say I feel pretty great lately, sure I’d rather be 100% recovered, but life has been good lately, I generally feel very positive. My erections are great, orgasms are powerful and the semen quality and ammount is just perfect too. I can jerk off two times in a very short time and still do good sexually on these mentioned fronts. I can definitely say sexual side effects have improved a lot over time and still appear to do so. I’m still nowhere near my former self though in terms of libido and the fact that having orgasms still affects me negatively the days after. The main thing I’ve found that orgasms generally affect is my sleep and thereby starting a chain reaction of other symptoms, being the overly aggressive behaviour I will have the day after and also the muscle twitches. I dunno wether it’s the bad sleep or the hormonal changes because of having an orgasms, or both, but I will be so tense and extremely pissed off that it’s not uncommon that I blow off some steam by punching holes in my doors and walls. Having orgasms does not affect my ability work out in any way shape or form though, I won’t lose any strength or endurance. Long term abstinence also seems to improve my libido I can tell from my last try. So what I’m now planning on doing is staying abstinent for a very, very long time and see what it does for me. I’ve never tried it for more than a month and having orgasms seems to do more bad than good anyway. So why not stay away from it, seeing as how my low libido tells me physically my body doesn’t need or want it anyway.
Thanks for your concern, it’s much appreciated. I was taking this stuff under my general practicioner’s supervision, he never prescribed me more than 7 pills to prevent me getting addicted. The last thing he wants is having yet another drug causing more problems.
In the meantime, since my last post, I’ve also tried a medicine called ambien for sleep. It seemed to help me nearly in the exact same way temazepam did. For me it’s an effective symptom manager than improves my sleep to some extent. My final 2 pills from the 7 pill strip didn’t do jack shit though and it lost it’s effect entirely, I slept just as bad without as without taking them.
I’ve now found what is really working for me though. Since 4 days I’ve been taking [Size=4]gabapentin[/size] and goddamn does it work for me. Whereas before I was only able to sleep for an average of 6 to 7 hours on a good day, this stuff let’s me sleep very deep for 9 to 10 hours straight. And when I wake up, I feel so damn awesome. After the first night of taking it, I woke up with some solid morning wood and felt better than I’ve felt in a very, VERY long time. I wake up so refreshed and feeling good. I hear the birds sing, see the sun shine outside and realize what a beautiful day it is. Instead of waking up grumpy and pissed off I now think of what a great day it is and all the cool things I could do. I take days like these as a blessing and a reminder of how great life can be and how awesome it will be all the time again once I’ve recovered. Because I truly believe I will sooner or later.
Ermm yea that’s all for now, long ass fucking post this turned out to be lol.
how did you get prescribed that? did you do a sleep study or something?
My general practitioner/home doctor.
Your symptoms and everything you just said in your latest post is pretty much exactly what I have. Sleep is also vital in my recovery, the better I sleep the better I get, and on all fronts. If I get 2 decent nights sleep in a row the benefits that come are incremental, but I don’t usually manage more than 2 nights, because I then start to feel horny, jack-off and have poorer sleep! My sleep is so sensitive and i’ve not managed to cure it yet, so I am perpetually stuck with a medium grade PFS (if that makes sense).
It’s encouraging what you write, very well done on getting to where you are at 
Yea I get what you mean, I too wish I would have better quality sleep permanently because to me too it feels like it would be winning more than half the battle. Good sleep means feeling just great, bad sleeps seems to bring forth a catalyst of total gayness in symptoms. Makes sense to say steady great sleep over a long period of time leads to more progress in recovery. Seeing as how jerking off affects you in the same way I’d suggest joining the “no fapping” club too dude.
I sadly have to report that my sleep has gone tits vertical again the last couple of days with the goddamn heat that has been pestering me. It literally turns my room into an oven over the period of day. I’m drowning in my own sweat at night and it’s just physically impossible to fall asleep with these infernal temperatures. Even gabapentin can’t help with this ass-hattery.
On a brighter note though, gabapentin still seems to bring positive effects despite not doing much for my sleep the past couple of days. Ever since taking this stuff I’ve noticed a very apparent increase of both facial and chest hair. This stuff has also increased my muscle mass, or perhaps more so the definition and shape. My muscles are now harder and fuller. I’m now not as puffy and soft as I was before. The cutting back of body fat to around 10% I did recently helped a whole lot with this too obviously. It gave me way more muscle definition, even without flexing my muscles you could see veins all over the place. Having taken gabapentin now brought this to a new level however, my muscles are much harder and fuller.
It seems like gabapentin has been switching on something in my body and kickstart certain things which I’m taking as a very good thing.
And now that I think of it while posting, another random thing this stuff has fixed is the puffy nipples, I would get them mostly at night as far as I remember. Gabapentin has been giving me normal nipples throughout the entire day, I’m thinking that’s also a very good thing.
Ditto
My GP has also prescribed me GABApentin, so I will see how it goes for me. Have you been taking it in the day too? That’s how mine has been prescribed.
Blunted, I know you snubbed CBT, but I would seriously explore this angle in tandem to your other efforts. I’ve not started the CBT courses but I just finished reading the Effortless Sleep Method. DEFINITELY buy this and read it. It talks a lot about re-programming your mind and body to sleep again. I thought some of this stuff was BS, but there are a couple of gems in there that have helped my sleep immensely the past 1 week. Last night my body almost slept the whole night, but it did break during the night for a piss. I’m actually looking forward to sleep tonight for the first time in a long time.
Hi, Blunted -
Thanks for posting your regimen and experiences. How has your recovery been progressing?
I was wondering how things turned out with GABApentin. At the time that you last posted, some of the effects had started to diminish, but you credited GABApentin with kick-starting your system in some way.
Do you still feel that GABApentin was beneficial? What were the details of your dosage and exactly how long did you end up taking it? Any side effects to report?
If you happen to be fully recovered now, is there anything else that you did that you would credit with your recovery in addition to what’s posted in this thread?
Thank you.
I think finasteride blunts REM cuz people don’t dream that much on it. So you are having some kind of rebound here.
Any updates? I am suffering from muscle wastage around the legs and calves. Like really small calves. I don’t even know if it’s muscle related or if it’s just the entire leg shrunk!
Hey what’s up everyone? This is Blunted checking back in with a story to give hope. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve posted. 10 Years, and what a crazy ride it has been. I had to make a new account because I haven’t been able to log in with my old account due to forgetting passwords and all that. This has been a recurring issue as some mods that know me (if they still remember me that is) will probably remember. The only Propeciahelp member I was still in contact with that used to help me out getting back on my account, stopped talking to me altogether after his broken English lead him to believe I was making a gay pass at him while discussing my libido some years ago. You know who you are you dumbass German clown, hope you are doing ok though.
I’ve tried everything under the sun that was available to me in the past 10 years in an attempt to make a full recovery ranging from pharmaceutical drugs, natural supplements, street drugs to doping (steroids and various fat-burners). I’ll leave out the exact details of most of it because a lot of it has been absolutely useless and downright dangerous even. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go down that road.
I’ll stick to what is working for me with sustainable results, along with some added information.
I’m currently on a pharmaceutical drugs cocktail that I would categorize as symptom management, I have no idea what would happen if I would go off these drugs. This regimen has been a stroke of luck more than anything. You can’t just go to your general practitioner and get this prescribed to give it a go. I hope by posting this it reaches someone with the right credentials to look into it and figure out why and how this is working.
Current daily regimen:
8:00 Bupropion 150mg / Paroxetine 20mg
16:00 Bupropion 150mg / Paroxetine 10mg
20:00 Quetiapine 800mg
21:00 Gabapentin 100mg
Gabapentin gave me some improvements 10 years back when I took it, but nothing as significant as my current medicine regiment. Taking the other medicine individually will do very little. For whatever reason this cocktail puts symptom relief in overdrive. While taking it I can say I feel recovered. Some effects were overnight, some are slowly improving. Most importantly it’s sustained progress, at least while taking these medications. As stated before, no clue what would happen if I stopped taking it.
How this regimen affects my PFS symptoms, being as blunt and candid as I can be:
I think this sums up the most important things. Let me stress again these are medicine that are not be taken lightly, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to jump on any of them going just by my anecdotal account. I know Paroxetine is an SSRI and can cause androgen insensitivity just the same as finasteride. That’s the gamble I knowingly and willingly made for that particular reason. Bupropion I have been told is often prescribed to counter act the sexual side effects from SSRI’s. I saw potential in taking them together. The only noteworthy change I had with starting that medication regimen has to do with receding gums:
I’ll add more if I see fit but I think I covered most of it with this post. I’ll drop in to give updates for those interested. Always remember people, never lose hope.
Interesting post. Can you please go into how you settled on that particular combination of medications and their dosages? For instance, did you add them one at a time and alter dosages or did you suddenly begin taking them in their current regime without any adjustment or additions/subtractions?
Sure no problem, I’ll give a rundown of my medication adjustments with timelines.
2014
I initially started out with just Bupropion and Quetiapine 7 years ago for mental health reasons. A combination of prednisone, heavy weed and hash use in combination with anabolic steroid poisoning from a tainted protein supplement put me in a drug induced psychosis. Quetiapine is used to treat psychosis, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder primarily. Bupropion to treat adhd as well as boost my depressed mood. I decided to stay on both because bipolar disorder and adhd are things I dealt with well before ever suffering from PFS. Taken them had nothing to do with PFS whatsoever.
Quetiapine 600mg
Bupropion 450mg, 150mg 3x a day
Effect on PFS: Very little. Quetiapine makes you drowzy and sleepy initially when you start taking it but the effect wears off over time. I would still have piss poor sleep due to PFS regardless. Bupropion I felt had a minor effect on PFS symptoms but nothing to write home about.
2018/2019
Requested to take Paroxetine because it is used to treat premature ejaculation. Knowing it is an SSRI I was also interested in seeing how it would interact with Bupropion because it gets prescribed together with SSRI’s to mitigate the sexual side effects. I noticed a very small improvement when I started taking it, but once again nothing to write home about. It wasn’t much, but it was something, so I decided to stay on it. What came as a total surprise to me was the fact my gums had stopped receding when I had my appointment with the dental hygienist. Not only that but I had regrowth of my gum pockets. After acquiring PFS I started having gum recession, I was stoked to have this process halted.
Quetiapine 800mg, raised on request to help me sleep better.
Bupropion 300mg, 150mg 2x a day, lowered to 300 (because Bupropion and Paroxetine both have effect on the heart).
Paroxetine 20mg initially but raised with an extra 10mg on request (this way I could spread the intake of Paroxetine throughout the day for aimed better success with premature ejaculation).
2020
I had an appointment coming up with the urologist to have surgery on the short frenulum of my penis. I remembered Gabapentin killed the pain of pulling a wisdom teeth entirely the day after I took it 10 years ago. So I requested it again for the surgery. I was prescribed 300mg and felt absolutely amazing in every aspect of my PFS symptoms. I was horny, popped spontaneous boners, had morning wood and slept like a baby. And most of all the effects lasted for months afterwards. I recall vividly having to mentally fight the spontaneous erections in order to not strain the stitches I had from surgery in fear of pulling them loose. Premature ejaculation did rear it’s ugly head over time but to a lesser extent. I reported my PFS symptom relief back to my doctor and he agreed to put me 100mg of Gabapentine daily for starters and it has been nothing short of miraculous ever since. Premature ejaculation subsided again, not sure if it would return if I stopped taking Gabapentin. I’ll stay on it if need be, I feel absolutely amazing with this regimen and that is good enough for me. It helps that I have been blessed with doctors that support me in fighting PFS. My general practictioner even filed an official complaint against the use of Finasteride for treatment of hairloss.
Which brings me to my current regimen:
8:00 Bupropion 150mg / Paroxetine 20mg
16:00 Bupropion 150mg / Paroxetine 10mg
20:00 Quetiapine 800mg
21:00 Gabapentin 100mg
Interesting that you had premature ejaculation when most have numbness, or basically the opposite.
I’m pretty sure one of the mods reported the same. I think it was awor.
When can we affirm you recovered or achieved normal life?
4 years after quit? 6? 8?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but I’ll keep posting here to keep everyone updated. I think you’re referring to a timeframe of sustained PFS symptom relief without crashing before we can definitively say I have recovered, is that correct? I’m surprised myself I haven’t crashed already really. I’ve been feeling great for roughly 4 months without fluctuations. I’m not sure you could call it a recovery though when you need this medication regimen for PFS symptom relief. But at the very least it’s a working treatment. And I hope to God this works for everyone else with PFS too. Fingers crossed.
Hey, does this combo works for anhedonia/emotional numbness?
I meant, in other words:
How long since you developed PFS, you were with the syndrom until you get a 80% recovery for example.?
How long you get stuck with that until you were okay mentally and sexually to affirm “i’m normal again”?
I definitely feel more connected to everything around me since starting this regimen. Reason I went with Blunted"NoMore" as my username hehe.
Since starting current regimen (adding Gabapentin as the great decider) everything just clicked and I feel normal again, you know it when you feel it. There is no mistaking the feeling and that’s coming from someone who has had PFS for 10 years. I remember reading a story from a member who suffered from PFS for years and he decided to take 1 pill of Finasteride again to feel completely recovered for 2 weeks until he crashed again. I don’t think it matters how long you’ve been suffering from PFS and to what extent or how much you recovered in the meantime percentage wise on your own after crashing. I don’t think anyone is beyond saving, PFS is reversible for everyone. But that’s just my 2 cents.