Post finasteride syndrome and adrenal fatigue

Therapeutic Efforts Pharmaceutical
#1

Hello guys, since I have been here I have started Hydrocortisone therapy (low dose), by the third day on it, my muscles had regained their full pump and hardness and normal response to testosterone like before PFS. My dick increased in size ALOT, I guess I forgot that it was much bigger before, 9 months is a long time. ALL sexual side effects vanished (please note I am on pramipexole 0.20mg along with Vitex 1600mg a day, wellbutrin 300mgXL(been on for years, long before PFS), Testosterone Enanthate 200mg a week). I am on Masteron Enanthate, but only for cosmetic reasons to control water retention, otherwise I wouldn’t need it, in fact I found it to be counter productive in more than a very low dose.

It seems all these crashes we have experienced are Cortisol crashes, I thought they were estrogen crashes, but estrogen requires a lot of cortisol. After constant bombardment with messed up hormones, our adrenals give in, if you check adrenal fatigue forums, you will find their symptoms mirror PFS. The problem with this forum is most of the guys here are in the UK or other countries that do not have hormone replacement (including Cortisol replacement) so you guys fear what you do not understand. I had someone here warn me of the dangerous of these drugs. Further inspection found that the doses used to treat Adrenal fatigue are so low, that they are not considered to be in any way dangerous by adrenal fatigue doctors.

5MG of Prednisone is equal to 100mg of hydrocortisone, for adrenal fatigue, the doses range around 5mg of hydrocortisone at a time, 3-4X a day (those are my doses which my Adrenal fatigue doctor says are so low they are almost homeopathic). He wanted me to go on something like 15mg when I wake up and 5mg in the afternoon and 2.5mg later. Moonman wrote up a very good thread about this that I will enclose here, he used 7.5/7.5/5/5, I highly recommend his dosing, worked best for me, I lowered it due to some bloating in my face, I am too vain.

Cortisol seems to be the final issue here, I had 100% reversal on this, in fact, on pramipexole, at 0.20mg, whenever cortisol kicked in I got so horny that I couldn’t focus on anything. I actually had to lower the dose as my libido got so crazy, like beyond crazy, I enjoyed it for a week or so, but my dick got sore after jerking off about 7X a day (no joke).

I noticed all the PFS docs address testosterone, but none of them (except Dr Bailey) address Cortisol, Cortisol is required to respond to testosterone. This now I can see is why guys have responded to test and then stopped, they had some cortisol to respond, finally exhausted their supply and suffered a cortisol crash. All along from day one cortisol has been the main culprit, the reason AI’s helped is because they lowered estrogen which exhausts cortisol. So less estrogen, more cortisol to respond to testosterone, I had not expected a response to hydrocortisone like I had.

Now, moonman never fixed his libido, there are a few guys here (very very few) who have another issue going on with their libido, but I have yet to see any of them titrate up on Pramipexole all the way to 1MG starting out at 0.125mg and titrating slowly every week. That being said, this is really bad if you live in the UK or europe as there simply is no medical help for Adrenal Fatigue and seemingly none for hormone replacement therapy. Cortisol is the fuel to all the hormones, and as I started it, 5AR activity increased A LOT, mood went back to pre PFS, everything did, I couldn’t believe this one hormone could do so much.

So that is the missing link with intermittent response to testosterone it seems. Someone here, someone well known, an active poster is following me step by step, he is improving as expected step by step. He has promised to post when he is at recovery point, if everyone here fixed testosterone and adrenal fatigue, this forum would be empty. Trying to fix it naturally simply won’t cut it, and the irony is many of the “natural” things you guys are doing are stressing your adrenal glands and making the situation worse.

Moonman told me PFS sufferers first have very high cortisol which then drops down to low cortisol. I had finally experienced a total cortisol crash where it got low and thus fatigue, the symptoms of high and low cortisol are very similar. That can be confusing, but you can order 24 hour cortisol urine tests online. I didn’t want to go down this road for a long time, mostly out of the fact that I was not that well versed in this area of hormones at all, so I can understand your fears of the unknown. I suggest you guys read about Adrenal Fatigue, go to the forums, they suffer crashes, they have many of the same symptoms. I believe this is what lingers on for years, everything else heals except testosterone and cortisol, the good news is you only have to be on hydrocortisone for about 1 year, as your adrenals heal you taper off.

So there is a cure for adrenal fatigue, that is nice huh? I am 9 months in and at about 90% and stable for a while now. I also noticed on hydrocortisone my dick is bigger when flaccid as well, a lot of things just improved to 100%

Check out Moonman’s post

allthingsmale.com/community/ … 101.20255/

1 Like
Has ANYONE here actually made improvements by increasing their low testosterone levels?
#2

you will use t4 soon dude :slight_smile::slight_smile: because its all you have ever tried bounded to thyroid. adrenal fatigue/low t/low t receptor activity/high e2

maybe because you have impaired the endocrine harmony

you are going start supply all hormones that your body can create from outside within your own idea and random.
its dangerous and not logical and not going to cure you.

you even dont remember how a “cured version of you” is.

you CANNOT control the ratios of all the hormones that you intake.its impossible. let your body do this.

#3

NO!! Propecia impaired the endocrine harmony. Look man, If your sub 200 testosterone your going to feel like dog shit. If you have very low cortisol your going to feel like dog shit. Together you will feel like dried up stepped in dog shit. Not all of us can sit around waiting to naturally get better. I agree it would be very nice if our endocrine system would kick back in but its not. I waited months doing all natural shit and continued to get worse and worse. I am hitting this life ending POS syndrome with everything I got. Now just a couple months into treating this and I have improved. Your positivity relative to mine could have allot to do with your 600 level VS my sub 200… Think about that for a second before you give out advise because it makes a difference. Trust me.

#4

MCI, you are wasting your time, you are where I was months ago, trying to save them. They don’t want to be saved, they don’t have our medical systems, their archaic medical systems don’t have anti aging or adrenal fatigue. So they consider our new medical fields to be dangerous, since this is the only way to fix Pfs, they remain behind doing ridiculous things such as starving themselves. I have mentioned I am at 90% recovery, but this guy doesn’t even believe it.

Be thankful I saved you from their ignorance, or you too would be posting exactly what this idiot is posting. Good, let him recovery naturally, maybe in 13 years he will be where bizzbee is while we are improving rapidly with anti aging medicine.

#5
#6
#7

I think sanane is correct. How on earth can you be sure what to fix and how much of the fix you need etc. You are basically going to ruin your health even further.

#8

PVDL, we are working with a doctor, an anti aging doctor treating PFS with hormones and with Adrenal Fatigue therapy. Since I started hydrocortisone therapy, I have had a super strong libido (along with pramipexole), and my libido is stronger than before pfs! I am about 90%, and the good news is adrenals heal, this therapy takes a year or so and your adrenals heal and you taper off. That is what I believe you are all suffering from at this point, adrenal fatigue. After PFS hits and your body heals and adapts, the hormones suck all your cortisol and stress your adrenals till they shut down their production. My penis returned to normal, everything did, there are still some tell tail signs, like no body oder, but things are good enough, and as time goes by I will heal more and more. I suggest you get off your high horse and seek medical help, I got this doctor to treat PFS remotely, so that means he can remotely treat you.

I saved MCI from you guys, he was suicidal, it took me months to convince him that testosterone therapy would help him, and here you see the results, his next stop is adrenal fatigue therapy like me. You just don’t have this medicine in Germany or the UK, so you fear the unknown, but you should look into it.

What I don’t understand is why you guys keep calling medical treatment “dangerous,” we have very strict laws in the US for medicine, much stricter than your laws, or any laws anywhere in the world. The FDA is the most strict medical regulatory in the world, doctors have strict guidelines they must follow. Yea, I know what you are going to say “What about Finasteride,” whatever, that is the past, I am talking about the future. Doing nothing is dangerous, getting medical treatment that WORKS, is not, had I not spent months deprograming MCI from your brainwashing, he would probably have offed himself by now.

This forum is littered with posts from guys improving from testosterone, and we have seen none who have pursued cortisol with testosterone, I did, and guess what? It works, that is most of what we are dealing with here, I had a stronger libido than before PFS when I added pramipexole. There are a few guys who may not respond unless on test for 4-6 years as testosterone regenerates the brain. What do you think will come of these studies? A magical pill? Likely what will come is the same conclusions that I have come to, that our entire hormonal regulation system has been disrupted on a neurosteroidal level. Addressing each system will result in recovery, the reason testosterone recoveries have been slow and inconsistent is due to cortisol, I found that it increased my response to testosterone to 90%.

The studies will allow us to sue the shit out of Merck, hopefully they will find something, but if these treatments are already working, they are likely to come to the very same conclusions. Many of the guys on here in the UK just simply have low testosterone induced by finasteride, and they will never know as they have been scared away from trying hormones. I wonder if the PFS sufferers who killed themselves had tried HRT and Cortisol therapy for Adrenal Fatigue, would they have improved? My only advantage here is I came into PFS with extensive knowledge in these areas and I did not give up. Many here gave up after my very early experiments, and I did not, I probably went through 100 since then, and here we are.

I am done fighting to save people here, you guys can go on starving yourself to death and working out till you are ready to die. BTW, with Adrenal Fatigue, intensive exercise is just going to make the situation even worse, it did for me, but I didn’t stop working out. I am just saying, there is a huge lack of understanding here, and perpetuated fear based on ignorance from people who live in countries with archaic medical systems. If I have saved one life here, then all of my posting was worth it, and perhaps many more one day will follow my posts and recover as well.

Here is the doctor’s info

Harlan Bieley
561-842-7422
ask@hllmc.com

1 Like
#9

Hi JustQuitDut,
Thank you for still posting your experience and be willing to try many supplements. We need people to share their experience and to read yours is certainly helpful. For example in another post you mention the relationship between inflammation and androgen expression and that was iteresting. However I would suggest not to generalize and jump to conclusions yet another time. What you describe is called the “pregnenolone/progesterone steal”, for example see Chris Kresser’s podcast: chriskresser.com/the-right-and-w … -imbalance
There are many things that can alleviate this complex syndrome, and a healthy adrenals will help for so sure but the crashes that most of us experience can’t be due to cortisol alone, it’s not simple as that. Neither is the activity of 5ar/DHT, which can be either high or low, and still suffer from full blown PFS symptoms. The theory of raising 5ar/DHT to solve PFS should be cremated and buried underground, but keeps coming back. In this regard I can forward you some of Awor’s older posts.

Lastly, thanks for reporting benefits after taking a supplement, but please try to understand that in PFS world the time span to talk about a sustainable recovery from symptoms is measured in many months, and the same treatment may not work on everyone. A claim of a solution after a few days may sound like another “cry wolf” and alienate people, and lead to the closure of threads and sections. There are many things that can give temporary relief (HRT, SERMs, AIs, etc.), but could wane over time because they do not address the root problems observed in PFS, such as the negative feedback on the HPT axis, the depleted neurosteroids, methylation, the enzymatic production, and likely the epigenetic mutation of the receptors.

By the way, if you want to help the adrenals, an adaptogen herb like ashwaghanda is great and very safe, many people have been taking it for more than a year with no adverse effects.

#10

But how does it ‘help’ the adrenals? Ashwaghanda suppresses cortisol, which may treat someone with high cortisol, but would obviously harm someone with low cortisol.

All these theories on adrenal fatigue are simply regurgitated from pseudo-science blogs with no scientific evidence. They tell you if you’re fatigued then your adrenals must be worn out, but never mention actually testing for the actual dysfunction.

If you think your adrenals are sluggish, take a ACTH stimulation test. This indicates your morning level of cortisol, and how well it responds to an injection of ACTH. That will give you proof of whether they are underactive or overactive. Simply diving in and taking cortisol replacement is moronic, and will fuck you up in the long-run if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And again, your assumptions on European healthcare is wrong. Both hormone and cortisone replacement are frequently used and available. Steroids are also effectively decriminalised for personal use in the UK. To suggest people aren’t recovering because they don’t have access is nonsense. They have access but clearly TRT has been proven to be ineffective for PFS. Something which was well established years ago.

#11

I don’t know how aware you are that much of the animosity you feel has been directed towards you on this site is self-inflicted. Although you may feel that this post is yet another “attack” on you, and that I am a “bad apple” that has been brought up within a “socialist healthcare system”, if you only objectively posted your experiences without jumping the gun most times with excited proclamations as to what is definitely behind pfs then your relationship with this site would be much less problematic and I suspect that even the theories thread wouldn’t have been locked. It’s a shame that you accuse people of attacking you and yet you are quite happy to antagonise whole continents of people with generalisations which somehow supposes an innate superiority of Americans and their health care and the power of the dollar. I don’t feel that there will be many here that will be cheerleading the FDA. What evidence do you have that it is the strictest drugs authority in the world, and if the FDA happily rubber stamped finasteride for cosmetic use, what evidence do you have that it has changed its ways? It is these sweeping statements which undermine your credibility which is a shame if you want to truly get your message across. You can’t be the saviour of the universe if your delivery means that the guys you want to help wont listen to you.

#12

No offense to awor, but he never properly addressed the 5ar issue from what I saw. He mentioned in passing that faulty AR could cause problems with 3aHSD (and therefore neurosteroids) since androgens regulate 3aHSD activity, but did not provide proof of that. I researched myself and failed to confirm that. It doesn’t make sense either since there are different 3aHSD enzymes, some of which have no real affinity to androgens and strictly reduce DHP and DHDOC.

If you think he did, please forward me those posts. 5ar does a lot more than form DHT.

#13

lol the FDA are a joke.

The only reason the FDA exist is to give cover to the drug companies so they can claim that their medications are “safe”.

youtube.com/watch?v=39a7mP1JoUA

#14

DannyFC, you are misinformed, Adrenal Fatigue is not being addressed in the UK or Europe, replacement of cortisol is not the same as addressing adrenal fatigue. Replacing Cortisol requires high doses of hydrocortisone which can be dangerous, but necessary when one has Addison’s disease. Adrenal Fatigue is another issue, very low supplemental doses for a year to allow the adrenals to rest and heal and recover. The stuff reversed just about everything left and made my response to test like it used to be before PFS in many ways. Also ended up with a stronger libido when adding pramipexole. My only issue is water retention in the face, this prob won’t bother any of you, it is my vanity and downfall.

You can call it BS all you want, but it certainly changed my life, and if you red through adrenal fatigue forums, you will read very similar stories to what many here are dealing with. Your adrenals can’t heal naturally when they are this fucked up from PFS unfortunately. Many of the methods guys here are trying to recover (like fasting or excessive workouts) just makes things even worse. I have been working out and won’t stop due to my body, but it isn’t helping adrenal fatigue, just making it worse. Since I started hydrocortisone, everything changed though, we are talking very low doses 5-10mg, these doses are not dangerous and do not affect the immune system.

#15

My posts aren’t for today, they are for those who come here following my posts in the future, I managed to save one person at least, I am not interested in how people perceive me here, just sharing info.

#16

Elijah, I have been managing PFS for months now, just reporting new progress as I make and discover it. As for Awor, his posts are not credible to me, this is a problem with 5AR, I am certain, I have already posted many times why. 5AR3 is responsible for ocular and neurological function, 5AR1,2, sexual, muscular, libido, male body oder. Cortisol is increasing 5AR in me (more sebum production), Awor said that using test was like taking more finasteride. His posts are thus discredited as testosterone has been essential in my recovery and many others, I had to deprogram MCI from this thinking in order to help him get on the path to recovery.

I am not saying there are other issues with PFS, but testosterone therapy has helped a lot of guys, I haven’t seen one on it consistently for years who didn’t recovery. Furthermore, addressing adrenal fatigue increased my response to testosterone and what was left over. Either way, thank you for the kind post.

#17

Can you post your sources for the functions of 5ar 1 and 3?

What I have read is that 5ar1 is involved in neurosteroid reduction (also present in sebaceous glands) and 5ar3 is used in both testosterone and lipid (dolichol synthesis) reduction.

I’m surprised that there isn’t a sort of encyclopedia for this sort of stuff on this forum.

#18

Its pretty archaic to approve and give out a medication like Propecia. They all know for a fact it has an impact on hormonal balance. Its pretty archaic for our medical system to allow this then deny that its caused any serious harm when reported. The medical community is in the dark ages everywhere in respect to this area of medicine and we all just stepped into a large pile of shit when we trusted these idiots and took Propecia.

This is just my case… I think Propecia puts the body so far out of balance that a number of conditions/issue attack each of us. I gave myself several months of natural approaches only to get worse as time went on.

However in my case so far after being on the Testosterone therapy for about 2/3 months now my eyes feel much better. I had a follow up exam and my dry eyes are much better. My muscles and joints feel much better. I can lift weights without getting the muscle pull feeling. I sleep much better. I appears that my wasting has stopped.

Not improved… Feeling fatigued and dizzy even after a good night sleep. I wake up and feel tired and unmotivated. Stimulants that used to help before PFS have no effect. Light sensitivity/Visual snow. Feelings of hopelessness and depression. Largely fed by having no energy. I notice when I have some spurts of energy my depressive feelings are much less. Libido is mostly non existent. I can perform but it doesn’t feel the same.

I mention some of the symptoms to my doctor and even he said it sounds like a cortisol issue. At least the fatigue.

#19

I think that you miss my point. Maybe you may have saved more people if you didn’t consistently undermine yourself by always proclaiming that you now know what pfs is and by antagonising members with your sweeping generalisations and apparent arrogance. People are less likely to believe you because of this. If you’re keen on saving future sufferers of pfs, how you present yourself is important. And if some of your info is clearly wrong, how do you expect guys to believe the rest?

1 Like
#20

drlam.com/articles/adrenal_f … ormone.asp

I have no interest in arguing about this stuff, im just sharing info, you guys who don’t believe in adrenal fatigue. News flash, Adrenal Fatigue started out like PFS, even today many doctors deny it exists. I suggest you read that link above, get informed. Im not saying it’s s cure, but it seems to be what everyone is recovering from here when they recover years later. I didn’t expect hydrocortisone to do anything dramatic like pump up my muscles or my libido or muscle hardness, or fix my mood and depression.

If you read the adrenal fatigue forums, they sound just like this, just saying! Ok im escaping back to solvepfs, I am healing my adrenals and can’t deal with stress. This forum really stresses you out, it’s no support place at all. You share info only to be attacked, and my attack on the foreign medical systems has to do with so many people here calling hormone replacement “dangerous.”

And Dannyfc, you know very well in Europe and the UK they don’t prescribe hormones unless your nuts have been cut off and you absolutely have 0 test. Anti aging medicine is what’s helping people with PFS.