I tried to contact Zach to his westminstercollege email address, but it’s not valid anymore. Anyway, if you find another way to contact him, we should write him. Here is the draft of my email. Feel free to edit it before sending it to him:
[i]
Hi Zach,
I hope you get this email. This is m_81 from propeciahelp.com, a forum dedicated to persistent side effects of a drug we both know: propecia (finasteride).
I just read an article about you: suite101.com/content/olympics-skeleton-athlete-zach-lund-takes-leave-of-absence-a308266. First of all, I’m really sorry for your sad adventure with finasteride and doping committees; you must fee awful.
Unfortunately, reading about your use of finasteride and your current lack of passion for skeleton, the first thing I thought is that you suffer, together with me and thousands of other men, of the post finasteride syndrome, which is a widely unknown and misdiagnsed medical problem. The syndrome is developed during or after discontinuing finasteride treatment, may last indefinitely, and consists of a lot of symptoms, including, but not limited to the ones you have reported in the article, namely lack of initiative and lack of drive. You can find the list of symptoms here: propeciahelp.com/symptoms. It is believed that the symptoms are caused by some sort of androgen resistance/insensitivity.
Anyway, I truly hope that your lack of drive and passion are NOT due to this horrible problem. But, in case you also have other symptoms of this syndrome, then these problems are not “in your mind”, but are caused by lack of androgen activity. Be aware that there is a support group that can help you cope with them.
Cheers,
m_81[/i]