I know it’s technically a stronger drug, but due to it’s extremely long half-life (5 weeks) vs finasteride’s (8 hours) the body theoretically is far more able to acclimate to it leaving. The vast majority of post-5ARI sufferers on here are from using fin, and most of them had a crash. I’m aware that there are Dut sufferers here as well, and I’m not trying to minimize their problems, but from what I’ve read I have yet to come across any that have had a full-blown endocrine crash. The Dut sufferers seem to have come off the drug, slowly improved, but never returned to where they were before. Of the stories I’ve seen on here, the people who never had a crash seem to have the best chance of having any sort of sustained recovery. Again, I’m NOT minimizing their problems - it’s an awful condition whether you had a crash or not. Of course, if there are any exceptions out there, then please let me know and I’ll have this corrected.
If our goal is to ultimately ban finasteride, maybe a pragmatic approach would be convincing the ignorant people who still prescribe finasteride to replace it with dutasteride in the interim. I know it’s not ideal - ultimately all 5ARI’s should be gone for good - but the perfect is the enemy of the good. And it may be easier to convince regulatory agencies to ban finasteride if dutasteride were seen as a safer (in the long-term if not the short-term) alternative for male-pattern baldness. And if fin was banned, even if dut wasn’t, I’d imagine that could open pandora’s box to successful litigation against Merck and other fin manufacturers.
And then there’s the fact that people are generally more intimidated by dutasteride than fin, so the odds of someone going on it, and the odds of physicians prescribing it for baldness, would probably be noticeably less.
Thoughts?