Suicide

General Discussion
#21

It is a complex thing. The point is, that this drug was marketed as being safe… it was promoted and sold to young men under the guise of being safe. That was Merck’s doing. Many men, especially young men do not want to go bald, for their own looks and for how they think others might judge them. Really it doesn’t matter much but its hard telling that to a 18-35 year old.

Doctors prescribing it only knew (although NOW most of them should be aware of the more harmful side effects) what their taught in med school, what the PDR says, and what big pharma reps tell them… which is obviously going to biased. So its hard to blame them either.

I don’t blame myself anymore, I never really did though I was upset at myself for not doing more research. Some guys do blame themselves a lot, but we all only know what we can learn for ourselves and we were all taught to trust medical authority. I don’t blame my doctor much but I do think he should have been more aware, however there are many, many drugs out there and knowing the obscure side effects of all of them is almost impossible for a general practitioner.

I don’t really blame all women either, like the previous poster implied.

I do think that most of the blame for this situation rests on the company Merck, and the governments who allowed this drug to be sold without more testing. Though Merck especially since even now with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they continue to deny aggressively that their drug could possibly cause these side effects; they do this in the face of a number of suicides and many various personal accounts of suffering. And for that, not only are they civilly responsible for it, but also criminally responsible in my opinion because of their blatant and callous disregard for human suffering. All the while they are suppose to be a company helping people with medical problems not harming them.

#22

I mean hats off to Merck on this one. Really, they invented the perfect poison, and put us in a position where most people would be easily fooled. I trusted my doctor as many do, and actually today, I finally spoke to her about that fateful day ten years ago when she first prescribed me propecia. I was so young, so the red flags weren’t evident to me. So I asked her about those flags and why they weren’t evident to her.

She told me then that once I stopped taking the drug, the benefits would go away. I assume many of your docs told you the exact same thing. Great ploy on Merck’s part. Really genius. I cared less about taking drugs, but it created incentive to keep taking it. She told me 1% got the sexual sides, but those disappeared after stopping. I remembered that over the years, and never got any noticeable sides at all till I finally crashed, so all seemed as she had suggested. I asked her why she wouldn’t question that aspect of a drug or remind me whether I really wanted to put a chemical in my body for the forseeable future, but said it made perfect sense. I told her I had no idea propecia was a smaller dose of the drug they use for prostate cancer, and why she wouldn’t have questioned why that was safe or healthy for a young man. She said some drugs cause unintended side effects, and that was a benefit they were finding from men who took proscar. So that made perfect sense to her too. I asked her whether it made sense having a drug that interfered with testosterone. She said is all sound legit. Docs believe in drugs, and we can blame ourselves all we want, but when a doc gives you no reason not to take a drug, it makes the decision making skewed and difficult. Hindsight always 20/20, but you wonder why any doctor would think it good. FDA approves, so good enough for them. And when we spoke today, she said she looked in the “literature” and could not find anything really damning about finasteride. I was like WTF? So I politely ripped her a new one, but that does little to help my neurotoxic suffering and my 90 year old body.

#23

The newer PDR’s should contain the warnings about persistent side sexual side effects and depression at the least, because the FDA required the changes.

#24

Yes even the current PDR shows propecia as being safe. For all of us, its one of those tough lessons that I constantly remind myself, “where was this lesson not learned” along the way. I work at a hospital, and when I first crashed and didn’t realize why, I saw eight different doctors of different specialties. And I got eight different prescriptions. Not one reminded me of the danger of side effects or inspired me to research the drug they were prescribing. It was like this will make you better, and that was that. No warnings from a single doctor that one in five trillion people will get life altering disease from it.

So after we all got sick and started putting in the real work investigating our healthcare system, we realized that while most doctors do a good job healing, the system allows for injury without much warning to patients of its existence. I agree with BP that no doctor should know about the side effects of every medication they prescribe. But if only they acknowledged that they don’t know all the potential side effects and to inspire us to research anything before putting in our bodies. I mean nobody would ever have imagined that a drug for hair would destroy us so thoroughly.

#25

Unlike other medications however, this was a cosmetic intervention. All medications have side effects and it is about striking a balance between benefit/risk. It is almost laughable if it weren’t so tragic that the system allowed a medication for hairloss to be approved where the benefit of keeping your hair apparently outweighed the risk to your health. This breach in care by so many shouldn’t be underplayed as it is an outrageous act by those sanctioned by our governments.

#26

Yes this is a very important point Scotsman

#27

Yeah Scotsman it really is a great point. And also a perfect point regarding the genius behind this drug. Why any doctor wouid deem hairloss as a reasonable risk over any potential medical harm is outrageous. If only we all thought. Just a shame my doctor and I assume many of yours offered little reason why not to take the drug. The whole system is really perverse. I am hoping those who asked their doctors for propecia and were talked out of it call them when this becomes big and says thanks for saving my life.

#28

Realistically we should be trying to get lawyers to sue the US FDA and other countries respective drug agencies over this.

#29

The people I blame the most for causing PFS are Hair Loss “Doctors” who know about the side effects but choose to cover them up.

I know several people who contacted HRBR hair loss clinic about on ongoing PFS side effects. Yet they still claim the drug is “incredibly safe” and that the side effects “disappear completely in 100% of cases” once someone stops taking the drug.

These “Doctors” are sociopaths who should be jail for causing deliberate harm to their patients.

youtube.com/watch?v=LFkQjLdY8Ss

#30

The drug manufacturer is doing the exact same thing but on a much, much larger scale. I understand many people’s personal vendettas against these clinics and docs for their unscrupulous behaviour but Merck also has many more docs knowingly doing just the same trying to figure out ways to twist words and facts to make their drugs sound safe, including finasteride.

So this idea with focusing on a handful of clinics in Europe as being the primary enemy in this fight is frankly incorrect.

#31

They may not be the primary enemy but without such Doctors people would not legitimately be able to get their hands on Finasteride. Most GP’s will not even prescribe Finasteride for hair loss.

I know in my case that I would never have used Finasteride if I hadn’t of got it from a “Doctor”.

So I put the blame fully on my Doc who lied to me about the drug.

#32

Almost everyone gets their Finasteride from a doc, especially the first few months worth, then some switch to generic. In the US GP’s give it out quite commonly for hairloss and BPH. I got it in 2006 from my GP without any warning of any side effects at all. He gave it to me like it was a week long course of antibiotics and nothing more.

#33

This certainly isn’t the case for me. Many of the members on here were simply defrauded. I personally don’t care much about hair loss. Obviously I would prefer to maintain my hair over losing it but at the time I started taking Propecia I was informed there was no risk of long-term side effects.

The proposition was you could keep you hair if you just took a pill after waking up each day (kind of like a vitamin). Not even very different than brushing your teeth. If I had been informed there was ANY risk of long-term effects from a doctor or Merck, I would have absolutely not even thought about taking it for a half second.

I really hope the original poster in this thread is OK. He hasn’t logged in for quite a while and his post was very pessimistic.

#34

Yeah great point about the benefits versus the risks. Another awesome ploy by Merck-- to invent a non medical problem and to convince thousands of doctors that it was suitable for pharmaceutical intervention. I mean my dermatologist really believes the trade off was worth it and made sense. It’s really what haunts me in all this. Few of us got betrayed in the traditional sense. We were taught to trust the medical advice of doctors and for them to believe in the benefits of pills for eveeything shows how perverse this all is. Really hard lesson to swallow. Cancer wouid be favorable to what I am going through physically.

#35

I would suspect also in the initial licencing of the drug Merck would have completely overplayed the “emotional trauma” of losing your hair and this this was almost a psychological intervention for the mental well being of many young men. As Soccerguy says, this is an unnecessary medicalisation of a natural process which has been “sold” as legitimate to pretty much the whole medical community. The lengths that Merck would have gone to to get the drug to market, including I would imagine the referencing of the psychological trauma of hair loss, seems all the more disingenuous when considering the mental, physical, and sexual traumas wrecked on young men’s bodies and minds by this drug which when running contrary to their commercial interests they use all channels available to dismiss and with an initial evidence base which all doctors consult which isn’t worth squat due to their vested interests which helped create and manipulate the data.