Doctor warns against Finasteride use in young men

Mew · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

Dr. Andrew Rynne is a GP based in Ireland, vasectomy surgeon, men’s health specialist and author. He has written a blog post on the dangers of Finasteride and persistent side effects.

About Dr. Rynne: doctorrynne.com
Youtube: youtube.com/user/DrAndrewRynne
LinkedIn: ie.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-rynne/b/4ab/928
Book: amazon.ca/Vasectomy-Doctor-Memoir-Andrew-Rynne/dp/1856354830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287560262&sr=1-1

[Size=4]Male Pattern Baldness and Propecia.[/size]
andrewrynne.com/blog/2010/10/male-pattern-baldness-and-propecia/

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Dr. Andrew Rynne

"I want to shout this from the rooftops. However, I will shout it into cyberspace instead.[b]

I want the ear of every young man on this planet who may be experiencing testosterone driven male pattern balding. Please listen to me. Do NOT under any circumstances even for one minute consider taking the testosterone-suppressing drug Proscar or Propecia or Finasteride [/b]to give it its chemical name for male pattern balding.

Here’s what the manufacturers Merck say on their Patient’s Product Information leaflet about Propecia: “In clinical studies for Propecia, a small number of men experienced certain sexual side effects, such as less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, decrease in the amount semen produced. Each of these side effects occurred in less than 2% of men and went away in men who stopped taking Propecia because of them.”

What jumps out at you here is that figure 2%. However, even if you accept this figure as true, and personally I do not accept it, but even if you do, to the uninitiated it might seem like a low figure. But for 2% of men on Proscar to experience serious side effects like erectile dysfunction, loss of libido and reduced volume of semen this is actually a very high and significant figure. Remember you are dealing here with a naturally occurring normal male phenomenon called ‘Male Pattern Baldness’. This is not an illness or a disease. This is a healthy normal occurrence. If in an attempt to “cure” it, you are getting a 2% rate of serious side effects, then that quite frankly is unacceptable.

[Size=4]But here is the real lie that Merck is giving you in its Patient’s Leaflet. Do you see that bit there about “went away in men who stopped taking Propecia – ” That is simply not true and Merck know full well that it is not true. They know it is not true because I and hundreds of other doctors and thousands of patients have told them that these side effects do not always go away when you stop taking Propecia. We continue to be ignored of course. Merck in a multi-billion multinational company.[/size]

In some cases men who have taken Proscar, even for a few months, have unwittingly condemned themselves to a lifetime of Sexual Anhedonia, the most horrible and cruel or all sexual dysfunctions. I have spoken to several young men in my clinic in Kildare who continue to suffer from sexual anaesthesia and for whom all sexual pleasure and feelings have been obliterated for all time. I have felt their suffering and shared their devastation.

If you would like to learn more about this subject then visit them on propeciahelp.com. Please spread the word around. Taking Propecia for balding can have utterly disastrous consequences. If you have suffered in any way as a consequence of having used Propecia or Proscar them please use the comment box below to share your story with us. We would love to hear from you."

bostonusa2009 · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

That’s great Mew,

I wonder why it is that in the US & Canada which many consider to provide the best health care we have so few doctors that are on board with just how dangerous this drug really is.

I think none of them ever want to think out of the box. If the FDA says it’s safe, then by God it’s safe.

I recall someone posting on here that they mentioned one of their side effects the experienced to their doctor. The doctor left the room, came back and said No it’s not possible. I just checked Merck’s website and it’s not listed as a possible side effect. Too many doctors are absolutely laughable.

boston332 · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

Yea, that was me that happened to. He was acting pretty nervous. I think he was worried about getting sued. I think he knows he screwed me up but was covering his ass with that lie and hoping I’d buy it. He actually left the room then came back and said “impossible, its not listed as a side effect on the website.” Trying to get an attorney now but hard to find one who wants to commit.

martinM · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

You need someone in law school or who has passed the bar to push this, maybe consumer advocates?

Good news the word is getting spread. I wonder exactly how much Irish or English genetics is on this board…

boston332 · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

Well, seeing two PFS docs Ive had a ton of bloodwork. Im feeling pretty shitty. I definately dont have the same immune system. I seem to get colds and sore throats easy when I’d never get them before Fin. Worst part is the dead pain feeling I get in my penis all the time. I think Im gonna give the T3/clomid cycle a go then touch base with Shippen in another month. Mabye I havnt dosed up high enough on the T3 yet. So odd I was back to 80% or there abouts in July. Shippen didnt even want to consider TRT. Basically says you improve for a while then you get saturated and fall back down. Which is what most people here say happens to them on TRT.

My parents are Irish. Maybe just because this board is in English language but does seem to be alot of English/Irish background.

Anyway, I emailed this doc. Would really like to hear his thoughts about PFS. Obviously he his familiar with this forum and us since he refers to it in his blogs.

Luckfax · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

The Irish thing sounds daft at first but then there are a lot of Boston guys on here…

Crisler actually said thyroid problems were linked to Irish ancestry and he had them (he’s also of Irish descent).

bostonusa2009 · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

I don’t believe this for a second. It’s just another excuse to say Propecia is not the cause of the problem. I now know 5 guys personally including myself that took propecia, all 5 guys experienced side effects and only two of them are Irish.

boston332 · May 25, 2018, 6:28am

Oh, I believe Propecia caused the problem for sure. For example black people are more susceptible to sickle cell anemia. Just wondering if the number of CAG repeats in the exon 1 of the androgen receptor gene are same or similar for those of similar ancestry.

danny · May 25, 2018, 6:32am

Is it possible to ask this gp to modify the few typos, then instead of them and is instead of in or though minimum i just note the nhs at large r v picky. This speaking out from people like him, is good news.

Mew · May 25, 2018, 6:37am

Dr. Andrew Rynne has made a new blog post about persistent side effects from Finasteride:

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

[Size=4]Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – the Classical Design Fault.[/size]
doctorrynne.blogspot.com/2011/03/benign-prostatic-hyperplasia.html

Lets face it, these days very very few patients indeed will consult their doctor without having first consulted Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia. Love it or hate it (and I suspect most of us are not overjoyed at the prospects of competing with computers) it is now the way of the modern world. It is here and here to stay.

Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia or sometimes, incorrectly, hypertrophy, is of course your classic. It has become a Global industry that stuffs the search engines for thousands of pages. Doctors, surgeons, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical and alternative enthusiasts all feed greedily from the bottomless trough that BPH has become. Any wonder then that the middle aged man, finally deciding to consult a real doctor for his dysuria, comes laden down with tonnes of cyber babble and internet rubbish.

The textbooks, but now of course the search engines; tell us that the incidence of BPH is about 50% in men over the age of 50 and more or less leave it at that. Doctors know of course that that is not the full story. In real life we know that the incidence of this pestilence increases with age such that by the age of 80 well over 80% of men will be significantly effected by it. Indeed all men will eventually fall foul to this design fault of nature. For that is what it is – a classical design fault. The urethra should never have been made to pass through a gland that is destined to enlarge with age. All men should be recalled at the age of forty and have this put right!

False dawns, in the form of “office procedures” for the surgical management of BPH continue to come and go. Transurethral Microwave Thermotherapy machines, like Electronic Voting machines, now lie gathering dust in back storeroom of many the teaching hospital. They are embarrassing monuments to the folly of rushing into unproven new technologies. Not only did they not work, they were also quite dangerous. Laser Turps, one suspects, may very well be heading in the same general direction. I will leave to others to inform us about its true efficacy when the dust eventually settles on this still controversial treatment.

If recently introduced minor surgical interventions for the management of BPH have been more gimmicks that genuine then the same can hardly be said about the pharmaceuticals. I refer particularly the alpha blockers of course. In the last twenty years, these medicines have allowed millions of middle aged men across the world, to get on with their lives in relative comfort and without the constant fear of the nightmare that acute urinary retention must be. They have also allowed men to at least postpone, perhaps indefinitely, the indignity in a TURPS procedure with its attending morbidities. Clearly I’m a big fan of the alpha blockers.

Not so however 5-alpha reductase inhibitor. Because Fenasteride has the ability to reduce prostate bulk by some 25% and so relieve some of the symptoms of BPH, this drug is now being pushed as a first line treatment for this benign condition. I believe that this is akin to the old proverbial sledge hammer approach to cracking a nut and I’ll tell you why.

Over the last five years or so, for my sins, I seem to have become more and more involved in the management of sexual dysfunction, not just erectile dysfunction but all sexual dysfunction in man and women. On the internet, hardly a week goes by that I am not being approached by yet another young man recently prescribed Propecia as a “treatment” for male pattern baldness. This drug has the capacity to obliterate their sexuality, not just for the time that they take the drug, but for all time. This vanity treatment can and does condemn many young men to a life sentence of sexual anhedonia, without feeling, desire or function, to otter misery and despair for which, as yet, we have no treatment. If you would like to know more about this you can share in their pain on propeciahelp.com

I believe that potentially toxic medicine like this must be reserved for the indications for which it was first introduced and that is in the management of advanced prostate cancer with metastases. Here, as we all know, it can be life-saving or at any rate life-prolonging. Using it to treat a benign condition like BPH is, in my view, at best questionable. Using it to treat a naturally occurring condition in men like male pattern baldness, is reckless in the extreme.

Finally, a word on tadalafil, the longer acting treatment for erectile dysfunction. Can I refer you to the October issue of the Journal of Urology 2008? Here is reported a study that found tadalafil to be as effective as the alpha blockers in relieving Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms of BPH. Since older men often suffer from both BPH and erectile dysfunction and since tadalafil has been clinically shown to relieve both, might not an argument be made for prescribing daily tadalafil for such men. Two birds with one stone perhaps? I think so.

Dr Andrew Rynne.
March 22nd 2011

Dodgypirate · May 25, 2018, 7:40am

This is just great … a young guy like me of 19 who, before, was devastated about finding out he was turning bald and who thought Propecia would give him some support and a “cure” only to find out that it’s probably fucked my whole life up >:( …

I’ve taken it for under a month and have stopped completely … I’ve accepted I’m going bald and I just don’t want to think I’m one of those young guys who was tricked by the company.

Stopped it 2 days ago … side effects are still there.

danny_francis · May 25, 2018, 8:12am

It’s the harshest reality there’s no rewind button we can activate, just a sense of hopelessness and doom all over hair?