I’m a little confused, why are we still taking 5α reductase inhibitors
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I currently take L-Carnitine before gym session 5x/week/
I would consider myself “Recovered” in almost every category EXCEPT ED. I simply have low Erection Quality. Its really bothering me because its the last missing piece however its a very important and big piece for me. I cannot say I am recovered fully without fixing this.
Can you go bit more detail into your routine and how you think those specifc supps helped you?
Also any recommendations or supplements for my specific recovery efforts?
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I would do legit anything to just have erection problems
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Hi bro, can you please tell me if you ever had penile bends? Peyronies like issues? Slight dent or scar tissues on penis? Hourglass flaccid? Did it also heal back?
Did you get your erect measurements back to normal?
Also how about your skin overall sensivity and penis sensivity?
Glad to hear you are doing good. Any more details would be good, thanks.
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Fortunately I never had any of the penis deformities you mentioned, no weird bends etc.
I initially had total penile numbness but it came back veryyy slowly about 3 months later. now 65-80% back to normal sensetivity.
Overall skin sensitivity is great actually.
Again you have to keep in mind, i only took 3 mg of Fin! thankfully i quit the MOMENT i noticed side effects
thanks, Hoping for the best!
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Hi Livid171
Thank you for posting your story. I made a Success Stories Compilation with the hope of finding commonalities we could apply.
I will read your story carefully and add you there.
So far, the only thing everyone have in common is time. To be considered as having pfs, we must have symptoms past 6 months after withdrawal of finasteride. I didn’t find any stories of people who got cured between 6 months to 4 years after stopping fin. Most take 4 to 6 years or more. With ten years, you’ll be one of the few that I heard recovered after being sick so long.
If someone has knows of someone getting cured after 2-3 years of crashing, please share with us.
Or 10-15 year+. It’s always good to gather information.
I was disabled physically, mentally and sexually and managed to make all symptoms disappeared through diet and supplements, except for insomnia, which I keep in check with meds and herbs. I’m not cured, but I don’t suffer from pfs and I live a normal life (aside from diet and supplements). I crashed 3 years ago.
I sure find your story interesting. Yet, I can’t help but thinking is it the Rhodiola + Carnitine + Time that cured you ? I guess we’ll never know.
I have Rhodiola Rosea among my tons of supplements and for some reason I never tried it. Apparently it’s more effective if taken with Choline, which turns into N-Acetylcholine, a useful neurotransmitter used in activating muscles.
I have some L-Carnitine Tartrate also (an acid form of Carnitine which I did try with no effects). I wonder the effect of a free Acetyl ion after the Carnitine has been absorbed by the muscles.
Epigenetic silencing of Androgen Receptors is done by either sticking methyl groups to the DNA, hiding the underneath genes, or by removing Acetyl groups from the histones, tightening the DNA and making some genes inaccessible. On the opposite side, adding Acetyl groups to the histones will un-tighten the histones, making the inaccessible genes active again.
But then again, the body need to feel it no longer need to silence those genes otherwise it won’t activate the Acetyltransferase that un-tighten the histones, hence I believe time is part of the recipe.
Supplementing with Acetyl might have been part of it…
Ok. I’ll try slowly and carefully.
Rhodiola, in a nutshell, is a nootropic adaptogen that helps balance what is unbalanced in the brain, I read Carnitine raises testosterone and helps create brand new androgen receptors if exercising while taking it, and acetyl is needed to repair the epigenome and turn Choline into Acetylcholine. I think cycling Rhodiola is useful to prevent tolerance, I think Carnitine needs cycling on a 3 months basis as it accumulates in the muscle mass but hey ! Who am I to argue ? I’ll cycle it the way you did if it worked for you.
Congratulation on your recovery and a thousand thanks for sharing !
We need all the hope we can get here !
I wish you a long and healthy life !
Ozeph
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This study focuses on the Gamma Radiation quality of a herb, in this case Rhodiola. The study even mentions why Rhodiola would be the right herb to use the radiation on. It’s not that the herb induces inhibition to proliferation of BPH. It even says so in the study. So no, it’s not a 5ARI
In addition, we found that R. sachalinensis extract, as well as the bioactive components, such as salidroside, rosavin, rosarin, and p -tyrosol, had no proliferation inhibitory effect on prostatic hypertrophy cells (data not shown). Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effects of the ethanol extract of R. sachalinensis irradiated with 50 kGy gamma rays (HKC) on prostatic hyperplasia using a testosterone propionate (TP)-induced BPH rat model.
I’m about to give this protocol a shot. 99.999999% chance I report back with no success, but I’m gonna start tomorrow.
What I also think is interesting that both Rhodiola and Acetyl L-Carnitine increase norepinephrine which I haven’t seen mentioned here. I’ve wondered if finding a way to repair the adrenals to produce more norepinephrine would be a method to cure at least some of the PFS constellation of symptoms.
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Been on this for 4 months, cannot say I’ve recovered. I have noticed a bump at the beginning of my rhodiola cycles though. I too have been orbiting the new study around epinephrine and norepinephrine.
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1st day I took 1000 mg of ALCAR and 500 of Rhodiola Rosea. It made me incredibly motivated throughout the day and restless that night. I woke up and had pain my left testicle which is a telltale sign that I’m on the verge of a crash. After reading back on this thread I saw that Rhodiola Rosea is a 5ARI so I cut that out not wanting to give up entirely since it had such a great effect on energy and motivation. Sure enough, days 2 and 3 of just using the 1000 mg of ALCAR have been great. I’m not sure I’ll be able to incorporate the RR into my regimen but I’ll probably give it a shot again at a later date after I’ve gotten a good amount of ALCAR into my system, similar to how OP did it.
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Any more progress?
So it’s definitely a long process since it’s two weeks on, 2 weeks off, but… I think so actually. Even sexually. I think it’s resetting my norepinephrine production or something. I don’t know, but so far, so good.
Of all the stuff I’ve tried, this has been by far and away the most effective and I think I’m still in the infancy of the full regimen and that things will continue to improve for a long time. But the jury is still out and I will continue to update whether things progress or I hit a wall.
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The ALCAR-RR regimen has definitely been helpful for my severe brain fog and chronic fatigue (but neither do a damn thing for libido or muscle regrowth).
They do have to be taken on an empty stomach first thing in the morning and cycled to maintain maximum effectiveness…especially the RR. I no longer do the two week on/off cycle thing though. I’ve played around with it and found that just doing ALCAR M-F and RR MWF (no off-weeks) works the best for me.
I do have some reservations about the RR being a 5-AR inhibitor possibly hindering long-term gains though. I hope that’s not the case.
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I wanted to add to this thread because I was a severe sufferer with a ton of symptoms, and I tried the ALCAR based on this guys thread and improved greatly. I didn’t try the Rhodiola just the ALCAR.
I got the same brand he mentioned, but I took a higher dose and didn’t cycle it, instead i took it for 6 months every single day at the same time.
I would take 4 capsules all at once every day once a day in an empty stomach.
A few months in from taking it, my skin started producing oil again… I started waking up hard again, and can sleep 7-8 hours almost every night. Depression disappeared immediately.
I thought i would go back to my previous state and thought I was only “masking” my symptoms so i decided to stop taking it in hopes that I could recover naturally.
Now almost 1.5 - 2 months since I last took the ALCAR and my baseline has remained the same. Skin still produces oil, still sleeping 7/8 hours a night.
It’s very possible it was just time that did this for me. Or maybe the ALCAR nudged my body in the right direction. I have no clue. This month makes a year from my crash.
Just wanted to share my experience in case it can help someone else. May do nothing for whoever reads this, but worth a shot lol 
.
I went from 0 - 80% recovered.
Libido is the main thing lacking as of right now.
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So it took a few months to even start seeing benefits, including the depression disappearing?
Depression disappeared within a day or 2, everything else took months to resolve. It could have been time though, I’m not sure
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How are you doing these days? Still recovered completely without supplements?
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I also take ALCAR 500 mg per day and it really benefits me except libido. But when I stop I come back to my baseline after few days. How are you today? Still recovered?
Currently 3 months on empty stomach. Helps my brain fog and energy
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From my experience there is a general recurring theme in my recovery thus far that over time I get more excitation ability and less inhibition neurologically. Simply increasing the intake of raw caffeine doesn’t work. Extra coffee improves the sensory brightness but drinking more than in the morning leads to more periods of energy crashes but the increased arousal and erectile ability remains. Increasing my methyl-b12 dose helped the most in that area without the energy crash like drinking extra coffee did. I need a lot more of it now to function though and under 2000 mcg my body just feels too shutdown for lack of a better way to describe it than pre-this condition.
It feels like the body has some problem perpetuating a natural specific excitory neurotransmitter cascade that when broken by fin/sp/whatever is extremely difficult to get back online again. I think dopamine can be an issue for us but just increasing dopamine isn’t it either. Like you said it may not enough norepinephrine production to perpetuate some cycle. MY case was a lot more complex and I definitely had more than problems with excitation but when I tried adrenal cortex alone I only got wired and extremely anxious at a baseline level, when I tried it with yohimbine I felt somewhat more normal and the next morning I had more sensory sharpness that was just like my pre-sp state when highly stimulated. Like I said larger amounts of coffee and higher methyl-b12 are the only things able to trigger that whatever it is again that allows normal functioning of that system. If I stop the extra coffee it immediately drops off the next day upon not having the extra around the same time of day and leaves me feeling worse so it appears to have a sensitization factor. Sustained methyl-b12 at my personal level that works and keeping coffee intake to the morning allows it to get back online again more naturally in a more sustained fashion. Maybe the alcar cycle will reveal a bit more to me on what is going on here, not too worried about any regressions from it since I can’t find any from it here or any other forums.