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Guest
Guest
Let me start by telling you a little bit about myself and what i'm doing here. I am a doctor, i teach pharmacology and internal medicine at medical school. I have a phD on medicine. I cannot reveal my name or other personal information because of my possible conflicted intrest with pharmaceutical company.
In my work i have seen increasing amount of people (especially young people) demandind propecia or proscar for MHB. Some of them had good information but others had :freaked2: .
The reason why i am here is because i want to share with you guys some medical facts about finasteride treating hairlose. I'm not here to judge but more give you my personal and medical opinion.
1. Propecia can’t be harmful because it has been used so many years as prostate medicine.
-Finasteride has been used primarily as Bening prostate hyperplasia treatment for 15 years. It’s effect is based on reducing the size of prostate and therefore minimizing symptoms caused by large prostate. There isn’t any evidence that finasteride reduce prostate cancer mortality since prostate cancer and prostate hyperplasia are two different things.
The reason why we can’t rely on the assumption that finasteride is safe even for the long period of time, is that main consumers of Proscar/Gefina are >50yr. males. Because cancer and cardiovascular risk always arise with age, we cannot performe a reliable long-term affect on those people. Elderly’s body go through a lot of changes and a big part of them will get cancers or/and cardio diseases, so we can’t know if it’s because of finasteride or just natural cause. Simply put, we do not know if finasteride has long term affect on other organs because there is no known scientific method to prove that. The only option is to wait and see.
Almost every medicine’s “bad†side-effects appears during regular use, not during clinical trials. The reason for this is that pharmaceutical companies just don’t have the volume of patient materials and time. It is known among pharmacologist that we can’t even start to begin to understand one medicine if it has less than 2million consumers. A good example is aspirin. When medical society first discovered that it has adverse effect on thrombosis, couple of thousands of doctors cross America started to use it in the hope of preventing blood clots. After a period of time doctors found that there are increasing amout of people dying at bleeding to the brain. Years later we found out that aspirin causes internal vascular haemorrhage. Lesson learned?
2. PCPT result of malignant prostate cancer (gleason score 7-10) is due bias error.
Although it is clear that a portion of the result can be explained by statistical error, but we have to keep in mind that not all cases are because of that. It is very well established among urologist that stastic can’t possibly explaine that amount of errors. The main reason for PCPT result is morelikely to be more complex.
Overall the significant increase of malignant cancer in finasteride users is a solid prove that we do not know the full “potential†of propecia. Although they used 5mg finasteride instead of 1mg(standard dose for alopecia) the effect aren’t considered too different from each other, since both PSA and prostate size are known to reduce almost a same amount. We have to keep in mind that propecia are used by healthy and young men. The cumulative affect on these people is widely unknown.
3. Finasteride can cause breastcancer
Although it is known that finasteride can cause gynecomastia (fat tissue and breastgland ductus hyperplasia), the relationship between finasteride and actual breastcancer has been considerd very loose. There are couple of reports of men with direct relationship with finasteride and breast cancer, but in scientific society, two is way too little. Nevertheless Propecia official webpage have recently added that “propecia have known to cause breast tissue neoplasiaâ€. Neoplasia is often a first sign of cancer when changes appear in regular cells (in this case, breast gland tissue) structure and morphology to more “indifferentâ€= not resembling the original tissue.
4. I’m not going to use finasteride for the rest of my life, cloning are coming!
The truth is that we are closer to walk on the face of mars than cloning hairs? Cloning are not even close of happening, the media give too bright future on that. It is really hard to say when cloning hairs is everyday thing, but it surely is not going to happen at least for about couple of decades. The permits for cloning itself is going to take another couple of years.
5. I’m not going to use finasteride, other drug will come!
It took us really long time to figure out that DHT has something to do with hairlost, so we’re going to stick on DHT-blockers for awhile, believe me!
Conclusion:
My medical opinion is that we can’t consider finasteride as the safest drug, because the term drug itself is dangerous. No drug, not even aspirin is safe in a long run. But at least aspirin is treated for an actual disease! I of course understand why people would like to restore its hair ( I would be lying if I say I don’t envy dr. shepherd from Greys’ anatomy), I just want to point out couple of truth so that everyone can make your own decision. As a doctor I don’t recommend finasteride for young patients because the truth is that it is going to affect you one way or another.
I hope you all very succeful year 2008 and good health!
May the hair be with you! :hairy:
In my work i have seen increasing amount of people (especially young people) demandind propecia or proscar for MHB. Some of them had good information but others had :freaked2: .
The reason why i am here is because i want to share with you guys some medical facts about finasteride treating hairlose. I'm not here to judge but more give you my personal and medical opinion.
1. Propecia can’t be harmful because it has been used so many years as prostate medicine.
-Finasteride has been used primarily as Bening prostate hyperplasia treatment for 15 years. It’s effect is based on reducing the size of prostate and therefore minimizing symptoms caused by large prostate. There isn’t any evidence that finasteride reduce prostate cancer mortality since prostate cancer and prostate hyperplasia are two different things.
The reason why we can’t rely on the assumption that finasteride is safe even for the long period of time, is that main consumers of Proscar/Gefina are >50yr. males. Because cancer and cardiovascular risk always arise with age, we cannot performe a reliable long-term affect on those people. Elderly’s body go through a lot of changes and a big part of them will get cancers or/and cardio diseases, so we can’t know if it’s because of finasteride or just natural cause. Simply put, we do not know if finasteride has long term affect on other organs because there is no known scientific method to prove that. The only option is to wait and see.
Almost every medicine’s “bad†side-effects appears during regular use, not during clinical trials. The reason for this is that pharmaceutical companies just don’t have the volume of patient materials and time. It is known among pharmacologist that we can’t even start to begin to understand one medicine if it has less than 2million consumers. A good example is aspirin. When medical society first discovered that it has adverse effect on thrombosis, couple of thousands of doctors cross America started to use it in the hope of preventing blood clots. After a period of time doctors found that there are increasing amout of people dying at bleeding to the brain. Years later we found out that aspirin causes internal vascular haemorrhage. Lesson learned?
2. PCPT result of malignant prostate cancer (gleason score 7-10) is due bias error.
Although it is clear that a portion of the result can be explained by statistical error, but we have to keep in mind that not all cases are because of that. It is very well established among urologist that stastic can’t possibly explaine that amount of errors. The main reason for PCPT result is morelikely to be more complex.
Overall the significant increase of malignant cancer in finasteride users is a solid prove that we do not know the full “potential†of propecia. Although they used 5mg finasteride instead of 1mg(standard dose for alopecia) the effect aren’t considered too different from each other, since both PSA and prostate size are known to reduce almost a same amount. We have to keep in mind that propecia are used by healthy and young men. The cumulative affect on these people is widely unknown.
3. Finasteride can cause breastcancer
Although it is known that finasteride can cause gynecomastia (fat tissue and breastgland ductus hyperplasia), the relationship between finasteride and actual breastcancer has been considerd very loose. There are couple of reports of men with direct relationship with finasteride and breast cancer, but in scientific society, two is way too little. Nevertheless Propecia official webpage have recently added that “propecia have known to cause breast tissue neoplasiaâ€. Neoplasia is often a first sign of cancer when changes appear in regular cells (in this case, breast gland tissue) structure and morphology to more “indifferentâ€= not resembling the original tissue.
4. I’m not going to use finasteride for the rest of my life, cloning are coming!
The truth is that we are closer to walk on the face of mars than cloning hairs? Cloning are not even close of happening, the media give too bright future on that. It is really hard to say when cloning hairs is everyday thing, but it surely is not going to happen at least for about couple of decades. The permits for cloning itself is going to take another couple of years.
5. I’m not going to use finasteride, other drug will come!
It took us really long time to figure out that DHT has something to do with hairlost, so we’re going to stick on DHT-blockers for awhile, believe me!
Conclusion:
My medical opinion is that we can’t consider finasteride as the safest drug, because the term drug itself is dangerous. No drug, not even aspirin is safe in a long run. But at least aspirin is treated for an actual disease! I of course understand why people would like to restore its hair ( I would be lying if I say I don’t envy dr. shepherd from Greys’ anatomy), I just want to point out couple of truth so that everyone can make your own decision. As a doctor I don’t recommend finasteride for young patients because the truth is that it is going to affect you one way or another.
I hope you all very succeful year 2008 and good health!
May the hair be with you! :hairy:
