Dermotologist Claims No connection/Irwig Study Bad

General Discussion Media & Awareness
#13

If you want to influence and persuade these people you need to first understand how they think, why they think that way, and figure out what appears to make that will resonate with them.

Just as a hint, she’s not doing this because she thinks it will make her more money. If she were only doing this for money, you’d easily be able to pay her $1m to speak out against Propecia and never prescribe it again but she wouldn’t do that.

I can tell by watching her video that she would be a nightmare to discuss this with but other doctors are more mentally flexible, even if they aren’t coming to the table with your same viewpoint.

Doctors that practice in more intellectual and diagnostic fields like endocrinology are more likely to think critically for themselves. But these hair transplant surgeons just learned to memorize a bunch of shit in med school, they got trained by another surgeon to do this procedure like a fancy car mechanic, and they don’t really practice the art of medicine other than in a narrow way.

Dr. Rassman, for example, sees himself as a clinical scientist. Obviously we both know this is a joke. But if you challenge him to think like a scientist and walk him through the science, he will be motivated to figure it out. He does also serve as a thought leader in the industry so you can challenge him as a thought leader to figure out this puzzle and provide the answer to his colleagues before any of them can figure it out. This will override a lot of his pre-existing biases.

Otherwise, these guys just rely on what the FDA has to say as the highest office in the land, and so far they’ve been fucking this up really bad but it’s not over with that yet.

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#14

IDK if you can fix this easily, but for archival records, he name is actually Sara Wasserbauer.

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#15

Thanks, edited. That was mostly a copy paste from the YouTube transcript which is why some things come out a bit off sometimes.

#17

The vast majority of Doctors who peddle Finasteride will never admit it causes harm.

This quote has never been truer.

“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.”

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#18

Once the evidence is overwhelming, they won’t deny it anymore. Reuters expose was the first release in presenting very convincing evidence. Still, many did quite understand since it was a long-form piece, but some did. We need more things like that and the evidence will only continue to build.

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#20

Even when PFS is proved to be real. I think hair loss Doctors will still promote the drug but downplay PFS as being “extremely rare”.

I heard one Doctor claim in an interview that common over the counter drugs where more dangerous than finasteride.

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#21

There is no great mystery in Dr’s views on PFS. They will follow big Pharma research, listen to medical reps, follow their training and medical guidelines. Very few people in general think outside the box. Drs can make life or death decisions, are calm under pressure and think and act logically. They don’t change opinions easily so it’s no wonder they believe Fin is safe. For most people it is.
I expect in France they are more aware due to being given extra safety guidelines on Fin. It’s things like that which will change their thinking. Right now there is no major research to challenge Mercks safety studies. So it’s in Mercks best interests to ensure no studies like this appear. This keeps their drug prescribers happy and everyone makes money.

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#22

Hopefully we get some more evidence that says PFS occurs in a certain % of the people that take it. That way doctors can inform their patients and it will be up to them to decide if that want to take the risk.

Still, consumers will not be great at understanding the impact of small (about 1%) risks that can be negatively life altering. But I would be much happier if people understood this information.

Merck doesn’t really care about Propecia anymore. It seems like they’re going to be throwing it into another business along with other legacy drugs and drugs and separating it from Merck. They may be a little interested to protect reputation, but they have Vioxx perpetually looming over them that Propecia is a small issue to them.

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#24

Shes deleting comments on the video.

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#25

We should screenshot comments to showcase what she is deleting. That will expose her more than anything.

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#26

She has deleted all comments challenging what she says.

There was a comment that Propecia is the new Vioxx except that this time the victims are left to finish the job themselves. Deleted.

Does anyone remember any other comments?

For the record, the name of this good human being who thinks it is “disgusting” to link finasteride with suicide is Dr. Sara Wasserbauer.

From her channel description: “World renown hair transplant surgeon and hair loss specialist Dr. Sara Wasserbauer discusses the latest issues and science related to hair loss and its treatment.”

P.S. This behavior is stretching the definition of “dumb” to include other concepts. Maybe dumb is just not the right word to use?

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#27

I think sociopath would be a better word to use to describe her.

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#28

Pretty weak she doesn’t even adress the comments

She sure doesn’t know a lot about modern pr management haha

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#29

She isn’t stupid. Far from it. She’s just having trouble justify her preconceived notions because its a unfounded position to take

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#30

I’d consider that to be stupid. She actually thinks what she is saying is true, doesn’t understand why she’s wrong, and is saying a bunch of nonsense to make her feel like she’s explaining it right.

It’s sort of like challenging somebody on their political or political beliefs who hold certain ideas but never really thought about why they think they’re true.

What she lacks is a personality trait called open-mindedness and a huge number of doctors lack it because the profession selects for people who will happily memorize a ton of shit and then they don’t emphasize critical thinking in their training. Truthfully, open-mindedness is a rare trait among humans. The longer they’ve been prescribing this shit, the harder it is for them to revise their beliefs.

Physicist Max Ernst said “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Even Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics for decades until his final day.

This is a little bit oversimplified because some older institutionalized people can change, but our progress will be much more visible among the more newly minted doctors and I’ve seen progress there, but some urologists are being improperly trained.

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#31

maybe she’s too much of a coward to accept that shes wrong. big difference

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#32

Yeah, I definitely think that is part of it. Somebody who can understand these things will look at the study and figure out where the argument is strong and weaker and balance all the factors against each other. She comes at this like Trump when he’s threatened and literally calls it a false news report and makes insensible arguments about this.

To persuade people who are against you, you’ve got to say I understand where you are coming from. It makes sense the way you are looking at it. Have you considered these other four factors. What do you think about those etc.

I get the sense from her video that she is impossible to talk to and would shut down if confronted with facts she understands. It’s so similar to politics or religion. You can throw a ton of facts at somebody who is a staunch believer in something and they’'ll ignore it and make an irrelevant point because its a threat to her ego. If she hears this coming from a “thought leader” she trusts, she may be more open minded.

Another doctor from NZ had just started a telemedicine business where she was prescribing Propecia. She put up a video on YouTube and a bunch of guys here went crazy on her and she deleted them because they seemed crazy frankly. I sent her calm email with a link to NZ regulator describing PFS and she said she had no idea and thought those guys were so aggressive and didn’t know why.

I think a lot of people do bad things to others without realizing what they’re doing. I don’t know if that makes them evil, but they don’t like to see themselves as such, so calling them evil and getting aggressive will only push them in the wrong direction as we see with these people who delete comments.

The fact that she felt so threatened by Irwig’s article meant that it struck a chord and he’s doing a good job.

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#33

Word!

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#35

Looks like she got a bunch of people to put likes on that lame video she made and she is continuing to delete comments.

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#36

This isn’t really worth focusing on or even posting on the forum. She still has 3x the amount of dislikes as likes and there are still plenty of negative comments in her video, even though it doesn’t matter. She’s one doctor out of many and we can’t expect to persuade 100% of the doctors that this condition is real. They don’t really matter much to existing patients anyway, but its a shame she will continue to misinform potential customers of Propecia. Hopefully at this point, there are many credible sources that are publicly available that these newer people will have the better sense than to blindly trust her.

1 Like