I have finally recovered from post-finasteride syndrome (PFS) and I want to share my experience and advice with you all.
I am 23, I took fin for 3-4 months and stopped as soon as I experienced side effects. One day I woke up and my penis was smaller and painful to touch. I could barely get and sustain erections. Within two weeks I began to feel very tired and found that I needed huge resting times between exercise. Over the next 3 months I experienced a steady decline in energy levels and mood that left me bed-ridden and thinking about suicide most of the time. During all this time my libido was non-existent, my penis and testes were also significantly reduced in size, becoming more and more like a pre-pubescent boy. I also experienced some brain fog and memory loss.
A brief foray into the literature will inform you that PFS is too new a problem for there to be any treatment available, the three doctors I have seen haven’t been useful either, one of them even said “you know more about this than I do” while he looked up alpha-5-reductase in his medical dictionary.
Science is a fantastic tool but like all tools the results depend on the user. At the moment the user is mainly big pharmaceutical companies creating pills that treat symptoms rather than causes. Remember that they are companies and can therefore be sued if they aren’t trying to increase their profits: it is not in their interest for people to be healthy, they want us to be unhealthy and therefore dependent on their drugs.
In terms of evolution, we were fish at one point, what are the things we’ve been eating during the enormously long transition from fish to humans? Surely that is what our bodies have designed themselves to utilize? We haven’t been eating Hagen Dazs and Twinkies for millions of years, we’ve been eating plants, nuts, seeds, fish and meat. So I started eating that. Since I started doing that my health has steadily improved and after over half a year of horrific side-effects I am back to normal. Not only that, I am better than before, I have learnt a huge amount about life and myself, I am happier and more confident than ever. I’ve also noticed that my skin is much clearer and a richer colour than it was pre-fin, it’s a bonus that will make you avoid sugar and shitty food for good. We all know what we should eat but we give into temptation too easily and then justify it because everyone else is doing the same thing. This, PFS, is a good reason to change that and become a stronger person.
My recommendation to experience the same positive results I have is as follows:
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think positive
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eat properly
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be patient
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One thing I have learnt this year is never to under-estimate ‘mind over matter’, very simply because mind IS matter. This is the hardest one but if you can, think positively, it will have positive physical results. Stress and depression cause havoc to your body.
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Eat a variety of vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, fish and meat. Give your body everything it needs. It’s pretty obvious what to eat, just look at it. We can all tell what a good mango looks like etc. I avoid supermarkets for fresh food and try and get the most local and untampered produce possible, but I doubt this is enormously important.
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I read somewhere that a normal man produces something like 0.5mg of DHT a day, recovery is not going to be quick, for me it has taken more than twice as long as I was taking propecia.
I have had to leave out a lot of information to keep this post concise and as readable as possible; I have set up an email account to deal with any questions that any might have. To be honest, email me just if you want to talk to someone who’s been through the same thing:
Now I am going to add as many tags as possible to make this message easier for people to find using search bars, please ignore.
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