Welcome to our community. Please fill in the following template as a way of introducing yourself, and helping others to understand your background and situation.
Where are you from (country)? USA
How did you find this forum (Google search – if so, what search terms? Via link from a forum or website – if so, what page? Other?) Google search
What is your current age, height, weight? 35 yrs, 5’4", 165
What specific drug did you use (finasteride, dutasteride, saw palmetto, isotretinoin/Accutane, fluoxetine, sertraline, citalopram, leuprorelin, etc…)? Finasteride
What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)? 1.25 mg/day
What condition was being treated with the drug? Hair loss
For how long did you take the drug (weeks/months/years)? 2.5 years, approximately
How old were you, and WHEN (date) did you start the drug? 27, I believe mid-2012
How old were you when you quit, and WHEN (date) did you quit? 29, December 2014
How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)? Cold turkey
How long into your usage did you notice the onset of side effects? I noticed no side effects until after I stopped. I stopped because I wanted to see if I still needed the medication to prevent hair loss.
What side effects did you experience that have yet to resolve since discontinuation?
Check the boxes that apply. You can save your post first, then interactively check/uncheck the boxes by clicking on them. If your symptoms change, please update your list.
Sexual
[ x] Loss of Libido / Sex Drive
[ x] Erectile Dysfunction
[ ] Complete Impotence
[ x] Loss of Morning Erections
[ x] Loss of Spontaneous Erections
[ x] Loss of Nocturnal Erections
[ ] Watery Ejaculate
[ x] Reduced Ejaculate
[ ] Inability or Difficulty to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[ ] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility
Mental
[ x] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat
[ ] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating
[ ] Confusion
[ ] Memory Loss / Forgetfulness
[ ] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[ ] Slurring of Speech
[ ] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[ ] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks
[ ] Severe Depression / Melancholy
[ ] Suicidal Thoughts
Physical
[ x] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled)
[ ] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[ ] Testicular Pain
[ x] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness
[ x] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease
[ ] Weight Gain
[ ] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[ ] Muscle Wastage
[ ] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[ ] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes
Misc
[ ] Prostate pain
[ ] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion
[ ] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[ ] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[ ] Tinnitus (ringing or high pitched sound in ears)
[ ] Hearing loss
[ ] Increased hair loss
[ ] Frequent urination
[ ] Lowered body temperature
[ ] Other (please explain)
What (if any) treatments have you undertaken to recover from your side effects since discontinuation of the drug? Essentially nothing. I took a low dose of Viagra a few times, which didn’t do much.
If you have pre or post-drug blood tests, what hormonal changes have you encountered since discontinuing the drug (please post your test results in the “Blood Tests” section and link to them in your post)? I have hardly any information here, unfortunately. The most complete hormone panel I had was done sometime early to mid 2016, and the HRT doc wasn’t keen on letting me see the results (more on that below). I started with an endocrinologist in 2017 (I think) to manage my thyroid (Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism) and she tested T in a panel and if I remember, it came back as ~325 ng/dL total T. It was tested again in December 2019 at 452 ng/dL (the one thing I have record of).
Anything not listed in the above questions you’d like to share about your experience?
Tell us your story, in your own words, about your usage and side effects experienced while on/off the drug.
I noticed I was beginning to lose my hair not long after my 27th birthday. I was living in Seattle at the time. Like a lot of people, I panicked and made an appointment with a dermatologist. The first one I saw actually refused to treat hair loss on the grounds that it is a cosmetic issue, not a health issue. Apparently, I should have stuck with her. The second one gave me prescription for Propecia. He said that some people were complaining (online, I assume) about sexual side effects, but that these weren’t differentiable from the effects of aging. I trusted that.
I took the drug from about mid 2012 to the end of 2014. At a minimum, it stopped my hair loss in its tracks, and may have reversed it slightly. At some point early on, my pharmacist suggested that I let him ask the doctor’s office to switch the prescription to the 5 mg/day pill used for BPH and cut said pills into quarters, making a dose of 1.25 mg/day on average as stated above. This saved me a lot of money.
As 2014 came to a close, I was contemplating a career change and going back to school, which would entail a move. I decided sometime around Christmas that I would try going off the drug to see if I still needed it and would therefore need to find a new dermatologist and either pay the money for the real drug (as a student) or somehow do the prescription switch at my behest, which I wasn’t comfortable with. Hoping that my hair loss would not restart seemed like the better (if overly hopeful) option.
The last memories I have before the nightmare began were of my 30th birthday in late January 2015. I was not taking finasteride. Sometime around the beginning of February, I experienced my first “crash”. I was flabbergasted and devastated. Initially the most obvious symptoms were sexual: my penis shriveled to some unrecognizable state and I couldn’t achieve a true erection and had some tiny, watery ejaculate upon whatever you want to call that excuse for an orgasm. The emotional blunting was prominent as well. After some time, I developed a constant, urgent need to pee and an near inability to do so. I assume this had something to do with my prostate. These symptoms played out over a month or two and then resolved almost as quickly as they had appeared. I returned to 100% of my normal function in every sense. This lasted 3-4 months. My hair loss commenced again during this time, but based on my awful experience, I wasn’t about to take Propecia to stop it.
Somewhere around the end of July of 2015 came the second crash, more or less as bad as the first, and along with it the realization that my life wouldn’t be the same. I know that every user on this forum can relate to that horrible feeling. At first, I kept it to myself, hoping it would go away on its own as it did the first time. That one hung on much longer. Eventually in late 2015, I reached a point where I had to tell my dad. He was visiting me (I had moved to Austin by this point, my parents live in west Houston) and trying to figure out why I was so depressed/irritable/irrational. This disclosure eventually led to me seeing the hormone replacement doctor that my mother and sister used. That visit (sometime first half of 2016) left a lot to be desired. After a pretty cavalier consult, they took a LOT of blood for a hormone panel. They hadn’t heard of this as a side affect of finasteride, but expressed 100% confidence that my issues could all be fixed, most likely with exogenous testosterone, but we would have to wait for the results. Besides, I was 30 years old, and that is when your hormones start to fall off, they said. I am reminded of the scene in Dumb and Dumber where one of those bozos looks at his decapitated pet bird and surmises that it was the result of aging. I don’t have a hormone panel pre-crash, but I had enough T in me to bench press 320 pounds at five foot four and to produce prodigious ejaculations. And no, before anyone says it, I never took steroids. The hormone panel came back about a week later and sure enough, I was low T, as the doc (he was actually a nurse practitioner who was nominally supervised by a doc) related to me over the phone. He quickly prescribed me testosterone in pill form, though I had explicitly told his assistant that I wasn’t ready to commit to TRT. I asked what my testosterone number was, and he immediately became irritable, though he did eventually give me a website to go to to check. I never did. Right as I got the testosterone pills, I experienced my second significant recovery that lasted about a month. Even as that wore off, I didn’t trust the doc or the treatment plan enough to start it (I never actually agreed to it). I took zero of the testosterone or clomid pills. I stand by that decision today.
I don’t have too much to say about the roughly 4.5 years since. Plenty of ups and downs, more down than up. I tried to have sex with two girls (hey, different occasions) and was unable to get a sufficiently strong erection to penetrate. I probably should have been on Cialis or something like that. I may start. The way I’ve felt over the past 14 months or so has been better, on average, though I’m currently down. That improvement might have been triggered by weight loss from February 2019. I had picked up BJJ and lost weight to enter a tournament.
I decided to finally join this forum after lurking occasionally all these years upon seeing some hopeful activity regarding a low-dose HCG protocol. Perhaps I’ll finally give something a shot?