My 90% recovery and how i did it

Member Stories
#1

Dear Finasteride sufferers,

I am here to give you an in depth and hopefully helpful story about how I have LARGELY, recovered from my own post finasteride syndrome. I regret to inform you that I have not yet completely recovered, but the recovery itself has been terrific and has left me feeling much like my old self.
I will begin with the story and symptoms.

I am a 19yr old who began noticing hair loss when I 17. This obviously distressed me so I made an appointment wih a doctor to see if there was anything actually wrong with me. Thankfully, I got blood tests which came in handy because I had a basline test for a lot of the hormones, pre finateride. Here are my results.

	        PreFin	PostFinCrash

TSH_Centaur 1.10
TSH 0.90
Free T4 17
Free T3 4.8
25(OH) VitD 94
Prolactin 302
LH 3.9
FSH 2.7
Testosterone 31.2 24.4
cFree Testo 597 469
SHBG 46 42
FAI 67.8 58.1

My doctor said my Pre Fin results were totally normal. As you can see my testosterone levels are very healthy and high. He got me an appointment with a dermatoligist who perscribed me finasteride. As per usual it seems, this doctor did not fully inform me of all the potential side effects. He did however tell me about the common sexual side effects and libido changes.
After taking my first pill, looking back I can tell I did not feel normal. After taking another 5 pills (6 total) I made the decision to stop and threw the finasteride in the bin. At that stage I had expereinced:
Change in semen viscosity (runny)
Reduced sensation in the penis
Weak orgasms
LOW sex drive (gone)
Penis small while flaccid
I called my doctor who told me I would be fine and these side effects would go away within 2 weeks.
Initially he was right. After about 5 days, I was completely back to normal, feeling great. I stopped worrying about finasteride for nearly 3 and a half months after quitting the drug. I then expereiced my Post Finasteride Crash. Over the course of a few days, I slowly felt my sex drive lower. Then came the erectile dysfunction. My oragasms were weak again and I was freaking out. All of a sudden, after a week of theses symptoms, I returned to normal. Yes you heard me. I made a short lived full recovery which lasted about half a week followed by a secondary crash. To be clear, my erectile dysfunction could be described as mild – moderate. Luckly for me, it seems that I never expereiced true impotence or complete failure to gain any erection whatsoever. At it’s worst, I could probably only get it 50 -60% up. Sorry for the overly specific depictions but I feel the need to give these details to help people properly understand how this drug affected me. After the erectile dysfunction I experienced a lot of testicular side effects. One minute they would be freezing, the next, thobbing and hurting (not immense pain, just annoying and uncomfotable). This continued for weeks.
At the same time my family was preparing for a trip overseas. I was devastated that this thing had hit me before our trip and really didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay home were I had access to doctors and medical help.
None the less I boarded the plane. Whilst over seas I began noticing my testicles decrease in size. This was terrifying. To be fair, over this whole ordeal they only lost about 30% of their size. I went to the hosptial and was told nothing was wrong with me and to go to a doctor once I got home from holiday. During this holiday however, was when I started noticing the beginning of a recovery. Some days I would wake up and able to attain better exrections. It was weird and seemed random. My sympotoms flucutated for a while getting better and worse. On the good days I still couldn’t get a 100% erection but it was still an improvement. I have come to believe that the sun exposure I got overseas was very helpul to me. A common side of PFS is low vitamin D levels so i think the more sun you can get, the better. I went for some days without feeling any testicular pain or discomfort.
On the plane home marks another significat part of my story. For the whole flight my balls started aching and turned freezing cold. It was very weird and when back and forth between pain and cold. I also felt a sharp prostate pain. After the flight, the night I returned home, I took a bath and attained a full erection. This was a huge relief. This was the first time I had obtained a full erection in a long time and I was quite happy. None the less I still had a way to go. What I seemed to learn from this, was, as weird as it sounds, almost always, whenever I experienced any testicular discomfort, these sensation were followed my a mild improvement in symptoms.

Now that I was home I was more than ready to start trying everything to recover. THIS IS THE IMPORTANT STUFF SO LISTEN UP.

[Size=4]WHAT I DID TO RECOVER:
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I have experimented with a shitload of different ways to improve my symptoms. I would recomend pretty much everything I tried, even though some of the things I did, showed no immediate effect or correlation to recovery, I must’ve done something right. So give these things a try.

I can confidently say that there are 2 treatments which showed good promise in terms of recover:
Vitamin D and Excersise!!
Nothing has shown better results than these two things. Doing weight training and taking daily vitamin D. A known effect of PFS is low Vitamin D levels. It seems like a no brainer to take this vitamin.

Lifting weights is something I have thankfully done for years prior to this ordeal so I knew what I was doing. I don’t want to sound like a personal trainer or a drill sargent but I’m going to talk a lot about my program and the way I structured it for my recovery.
First and foremost. Don’t read all the bullshit on the internet about weight trainering and burning fat etc etc. 99% of it is all rubbish.
My program is a powerlifting/bodybuilding routine and is as follows.

Day 1 (Chest and triceps)
5 sets of 5 – 8 reps dumbell chest press
3 sets 10 or more reps bench press
3 sets 8-12 reps cable flys
3 sets 10 reps skull crushers
3 sets 10 reps tricep pushdowns

Day 2 (Back and Biceps)
4 sets 5 reps Deadlifts (Go heavy)
3 sets Pullups or lat pulldown
4 sets 10 reps dumbell row
3 sets 10 reps standing dumbell curl
2 sets 10 reps EZ bar curl
2 sets 10 reps Reverse curl

Day 3 (Rest day)

Day 4 (Depends how sore you are. You can rest again or Shoulder Day)
Standing Overhead press 4 sets 6-10 reps
Rear delt flys 4 selts 10 reps
Lateral raises 4 sets 10 reps

Day 5 (Leg day)
Warmup on Leg extention machine (don’t fatigue just warm up)
Leg Press (Go heavy) 3 – 4 sets 10 – 15 reps
Barbell Squat 4 sets 6 – 12 reps
Standing smith machine calve raises 3 sets 15 – 20 reps
Optional
Leg extention
Hamstring curl

Repeat from day 1

Honestly, these things worked for me. It was a very slow and steady race but my symptoms gradually improved along with taking 2-3 vitamin d tablets a day. I urge this community and those who are suffering from this horrible illness to exercise, control their diet and supplement with vitamin D. Your diet is even more important than your exercise.

Other things I tried:

Epsom Salt baths. The reason for these baths is that they are a well known cleanser for toxins in the body and give you magnesium which is absorbed through your skin. I can’t say these had any impact at all however they were extremely relaxing and a healthy thing to do (which may well have contributed to recovery). I highly recomend these baths.
L-Argine. Is a supplement i tried which is supposed to help with erections. It had little to no effect
D-Aspartic acid. Another suppliment which is supposed to act as a testosterone booster. Little to no effect.
Vitamins

I’ll be hanging around here for a while so I’m happy to answer anyone’s questions whatever they may be. I wish you all the best. Don’t give up! There are people who have recovered myself included. If I can help just 1 person through this then this post will be worth it. God bless and stay positive and happy.

3 Likes
#2

What was your daily Vit D intake?

#3

Glad you recovered so quickly, however this post is largely nonsense.

Your training protocol and recovery are not casaully related. There have been countless long term sufferers who have trained like madmen.

#4

you dont sound like a severe sufferer, like me and others.

#5

Hey man, he’s sharing the things that helped him, what’s that bashing? Stop dictating what other people gotta post for fuck’s sake. Any updates on people’s progress can’t do any harm; besides it would do mostly good. Stop discouraging people from posting

6 Likes
#6

how come he knows that his protocol was related to his recovery? since his symptoms only include non-physical ones it could have been in his head all along.

#7

Well I have to disagree slightly with my brother.

I do believe that he experienced side effects from finasteride. However his relatively quick recovery has nothing to do with the outlined protcol. Strength training is nothing new, and numerous members have tried it without much success.

#8

Yeah man, but there are also men who have tried it and have gotten benefits from it. Not everyone is the same. A remedy for one can be another’s nightmare. Not just weight training, let’s take fish oil pills. Some say they ain’t doing nothing for them. Me, I definitely felt the benefits from fish oil. And I decided to give it a try by reading people’s experiences here - backed up by studies of course. So, it’s not reasonable to say one’s protocol is bullshit etc. Sharing experiences can not do any harm.

If I was this guy, after some time of suffering and coming back here to report my experiences (which is a good thing at the first place, people that are getting better don’t seem to report back here often), seeing discouraging posts like yours, I’d say fuck all that. Don’t make people hesitate to report, please. Most lurkers and recent sufferers around are surfing through these stories/recoveries everyday and every update is definitely helpful.

#9

Its not a viable treatment/cure. At best it makes the symptoms more slightly tollerable. Viable treatments are ones that work for the vast majority of sufferers. Obviously this is not the case here.

If someone makes causal relationship claims, he better provide some prove. Especially when its such a old idea.

I have nothing against people reporting on their recoveries.

#10

There is NO recovery, nothing can be done, you won’t get better, others have tried and failed. Please just donate to the PFS foundation

1 Like
#11

There’s a RAT in the KITCHEN!!!

#12

What happened buddy? Did your progress fade? Or is this just a little sarcasm?

#13

@ gennaro, These guys are not discouraging people for one thing. I was fit when I took this awful drug. My physical effects were (are) so bad I could not workout. My entire body hurt to the touch. So when some newbie jumps on here with their quick recovery and posts about their workout regimen, (for ME) its really just an annoyance. Consider this … the people behind this site and the studies have similar long lasting issues. Your not even considered to have PFS if your symptoms go away in 90 Days. With all due respect a little drop in T that’s correctable with physical activity isn’t the type of PFS we are talking about.

Also many of you are not seeing the Hypocrisy in your own statements. You want to censor PLVD, Nota, ect. Why, because they are not telling you what you want to hear? Sadly they are telling you the truth about their symptoms. If your symptoms are mild count yourself lucky. They just want the study to complete, what is wrong with that?

#14

I do not want to censor anybody. I’m asking for common decency. I just want to say that, if something does not help you, it doesn’t mean that it won’t help nobody. I took fish oil, which helped me, and there were people who didn’t get any benefits from it. If it hadn’t been written here, I wouldn’t have used it. Information needs to be flowing. Everyone should be sharing their experiences and the things they’ve gotten benefits from without hesitation.

So, calling people’s experiences “nonsense” will discourage people from sharing them. And as a minority, we wouldn’t want that, I guess. There’s big difference between saying “I tried this and unfortunately didn’t work out well for me” and “This is nonsense”. Right?

And I didn’t say anything about studies anyway, what’s that gotta do with this? Everyone wants them to be done.

#15

This site has been around awhile. I haven’t seen anything new pop up here in a long time. If you get good a searching this site, pretty much everything has been tried. Everything from the very logical to completely illogical. Its frightening quite frankly, to see that most of the top hormone doctors in the US have given up trying to help solve this. They are open about having no clue why our bodies have stopped utilizing hormones correctly. Goldstein for example has seen a lot of guys. He does his best with his evolving protocol. If he cant solve it what makes you think a bunch of idiots here will somehow stumble onto something. Think Mcfly! Research is now being done at the molecular level. It pretty much means all simple fixes are off the table. But people here want to cry about their recycled theory not getting posted. Or you all jump to conclusions about PLVD or Nota or whoever.

#16

I think it’s more factually accurate to say the worse you are, the harder it will be to recover. With many people on here who have low to moderate symptoms, recovery over a period of time does seem like a possibility.

1 Like
#17

I unfortunately have to agree with this post. Clomid, HcG, anti-estrogens have been unsuccessful. These are the medications or “tools” that doctors have to work with, which simply don’t work for PFS. The studies, especially Baylor, will likely reveal where the problem lies and whether there are other medications that may help us. For example, if a certain gene is methylated and thus shut off, we may need serious medications like chemotherapy agents to demethylate the gene. Thats why the Baylor study is so critical. And stupidly, it is PFS sufferers’ lack of participation that is slowing it down, this study should have been complete months ago.

1 Like
#18

It’s a quick 1 day in and out. They do extensive blood work and DNA testing. They share the results with you. The bitch part is getting an appointment.

#19

Thanks for sharing your story, PropeciaSurvivor.

Glad you are feeling better!

#20

NOTHING WILL EVER IMPROVE!! Donate to the studies please! There is no hope other than the studies