Couple of points: This is not the effort of this forum as some are implying, this is an initiative by the PFS foundation.
Regarding this having a detrimental effect, I wouldn’t get hung up on this false premise. This forum has existed for a decade and a half and its membership is 5000. I’ve dug into the numbers and finasteride adverse drug reactions aren’t a deluge in terms of number of reports catalogued by FAERS. Sure, I think a lot of us believe these drugs are having widespread health effects past users haven’t attributed, but until this all comes out they likely won’t, so we can’t account for any hypothetical cases beyond the numbers. If you’re hoping that this goes so far under the radar that the status quo persists for 15 years, simply to get a doubling our active participation (of which there are so few you can easily become familiar with everyone here) and imagining research will get some tangible fiscal benefit from that, I’d argue this is going to be more disappointing than placing your hope in the recent potato cure someone suggested. The community has been a drop in the ocean in terms of what’s been spent on research funding. If it were to have any impact on our prospects, I would think withdrawal or significant warnings demanded by national regulatory bodies would be a eyebrow-raising acknowledgement of the problem.
I believe our hope is the scientific reality of this astonishing disease. If you are aware of what is happening to people on the severe end, and how little it can take, then you realise this is remarkable. This, in my personal view, is likely to represent a mechanism triggered by the drugs in question, and therefore is of high biological significance. Once this is clear, I would expect research will be supported by grants and institutions. We don’t need any more lives ruined, we just need to get the right things done. And if you want to take a look at this place before 2018 on the waybackmachine for reference, I am very confident that’s exactly what we’re doing.