Help! Should I stop Propecia now?

[Neuro]

Hi,

I appreciate your taking the time to read and respond to this. I have been distraught for the past six months with this hair shed.

Last December I began using Propecia. In May, I stopped using it for a week and shedding began. I immediately began to use it again and have been using it since, but shedding has not subsided for six months. I think there are some small vellus, semi-terminal hairs finally sprouting along my hairline, but largely in comparison to one year ago, my hair is MUCH thinner. It also seems that the hairs falling out have become progressively thinner.

What should I do? Should I stop Propecia, or how much longer should I put up with this? In retrospect, my hair was fine and if I had never "worried" and started Propecia, I would never been in this horrible predicament.

 

[hairwegoagain]

What should I do? Should I stop Propecia, or how much longer should I put up with this? In retrospect, my hair was fine and if I had never "worried" and started Propecia, I would never been in this horrible predicament.

If you stop using it, your prognosis is relatively certain - you will continue balding with a much-reduced shot at regaining.

As long as you're tolerating the medication well, my advice would be to keep with it. Any shedding that you're experiencing is hair that would have eventually fallen out anyway - that's a certainty. So, you can let nature take its course and slowly head downhill, or you can stick with it and play the better odds. Depending on how important it is to you, there's no wrong answer.

 

[Neuro]

Why is taking Propecia making me have greatly accelerated male pattern baldness now? Six months is absurd, hairs getting progressively thinner and not growing back.

I am convinced that Propecia is causing me to bald now. Before starting it, I had only a slightly receding hairline. This is not normal. The top of head has such thin hair now.

 

[barnabas]

If you're convinced, then why did you bother posting this?

 

[Neuro]

Obviously to see what arguments can convince me otherwise, moron.

 

[So]

LoL....

Obviously to see what arguments can convince me otherwise, moron.

Just because someone is convinced of adverse effects, does not mean they should not post to gain a general consensus from everyone else in an intellectual manner.

Neuro,

Just so you are aware I am experiencing a similar trait to you. I've been on Propecia for 6 months (just starting my seventh). I did have a 1 month break in between 5 & 6 to which some people said was foolish.

To put it bluntly I have had my hair diminish rapidly and aggressively in less than one year. If you saw me at the beginning of the year and compared it to now you would be shocked.

Based on this it is only perfectly normal that you think Propecia is bad for you.

I am still uncertain about its efficiency because it has not even slowed my rate of loss by one iota.

The only way you can be certain is if you stop Propecia, but even then the likelihood of stabilization might be low.

Even though I continue to take Propecia and that I have not hit the illustrious 12 month benchmark, I am divided in thought as to whether or not I will see stabilization and cessation of this constant, profuse shedding.

Where Propecia does not work, you need to investigate other means and methods.

 

[JDW]

Hi Neuro,
If you read the other posts by me then I have taken it for 5 months and had my hair devastated. Unbelievably thin and receeded cms at the front, thinned right out and temples have gone way back. During month 5 I could literally tug clumps of my hair out from all over. Obviously people were saying "it's a shed, it's a shed" but I have seen no evidence of a shed as bad as this and a recovery from it.
Furthermore if one is to believe the poll on shed recovery on here then there does not seem much hope for any sort of recovery from one this bad. I had to make a decision as to whether I would carry on, lost all of my hair by Xmas (nice present) and hope for regrowth (couldn't see it happening) or quit and see what happened. After two days off the damn drug my hair no longer fell out when touched and it had more volume to it after 2 weeks.

The choice is yours but most of the successes from finasteride don't seem to have had such an intense shed and you'd have thought that there would've been some positive reaction by now.

 

[JDW]

If you're convinced, then why did you bother posting this?

I thought you were in the same boat man?

 

[UK1]

I will be giving Proscar 15 months, if I am in your position at that point I will abandoning my regimen. You have given it a good go, look at alternative options if you feel it's not going any further. How were you with side effects?

 

[barnabas]

If you're convinced, then why did you bother posting this?

I thought you were in the same boat man?

I try to avoid making posts saying i'm 100% convinced that my hair has all fallen out and will never return, because I am not an alarmist and am sick of a few people like jeffsss scaring everyone else off propecia by making 5000 posts about how it made all their hair fall out and then never making any more posts after the 6 month mark so no one knows if it grew back or they quit propecia or what. This forum is great for getting people more worked up than they should be, cause basically no one that has recovered from a shed bothers to read this forum cause it's for people who are panicking, not to mention they got sick months and months ago of telling people to stop freaking out cause their shed grew back (ex bubka). Like those poll results are what happens when you put a poll in the middle of a forum that is designed for people that are CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING SHEDS and very obviously have not had months of time in between the shed and their answer to the poll to even give it a chance to start growing back.

And the forum is for people who are freaking out about hair loss or having their medications go wrong, which obviously is not going to give us a remotely good representation of typical reactions, and will not contain more than a handful of people that have been on the meds for even six months.

Not to mention my hair is not falling out at any rapid rate anymore. It still looks horrible but since it takes 3 months to start regrowing I'm not going to get too worried until march or so.

 

[JDW]

Yeah great post man but I've lost my bottle and it's great that you can carry on but what if you get to march and your hair is even worse with no sign of recovery and then you're further down the line than you would've been normally?

 

[blandflabbis]

JDW - I've posted this a couple of times but it isn't possible that if Propecia was causing your shedding it would stop two days after you went off the drug. If that happened it would contradict virtually everything we know about hair growth. If your hair stopped falling out two days after you went off the drug then it's a coincidence and it would mean that you'd already come out of the "shedding period" (if such a thing exists) or that Propecia was never causing the shedding at all. If Propecia did cause your shedding and you stopped taking it then you would see a decrease in hair falling out after about 1-3 months, not two days.

 

[JDW]

I understand and appreciate your post but I can only tell it as I see it and this is what happened! Quite possibly I have some kind of hideously unusual reaction to the drug and this was the result... I really don't know.

 

[barnabas]

Yeah great post man but I've lost my bottle and it's great that you can carry on but what if you get to march and your hair is even worse with no sign of recovery and then you're further down the line than you would've been normally?

The odds are, it would have been that bad by march without propecia's help, as I'm definitely not experiencing any noticeable sheds at this point in time. Slow worsening, maybe, but that couldn't possibly be caused by propecia. If things are still looking terrible with no hint of recovery by march I'll probably just quit the stuff cause I'll know it wasn't enough to stop my hair loss, not because I think it CAUSED it.