[AmericanChopper]

The side effects of finastetide can be pretty nasty, and you might not even notice you have them. You would expect it to suppress your natural testosterone production, which you’re not going to notice unless you ever stop taking it. It can easily reduce your fertility, which again you’re not going to notice unless you’re having trouble conceiving. The reduction in DHT can also have side effects that are far less visible than gynecomastia. It can cause ED, reduced libido, and mood disorders like depression and anxiety which you might not easily attribute to taking fin.

Unless you’ve had a lot of bloodwork and other testing done, it’s unlikely that you would know how you’ve been impacted by its side effects, and even if the impact to you is ultimately very minimal, a treatment that didn’t have these risks would be far superior.

Any exogenous hormone treatment (or treatment that interferes with the metabolism of hormones) is going to affect the natural functionality of your body in ways you probably don’t want it to. They’re all very risky and dependency forming. It’s almost not really true that these risks are side effects either, they’re just the expected outcomes of the treatment.

[seper8]

Finasteride does not suppress your natural testosterone production. Your free testosterone levels might actually be increased. As precursors are no longer converted into dihydrotestosterone but into testosterone...

[AmericanChopper]

I think you need to keep reading. Finasteride blocks the enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT, which initially raises your testosterone levels. Your body reacts to this by secreting less luteinizing hormone, which results in less testosterone production, and your test levels return pre-finasteride levels. This is the suppression of natural testosterone production, and is exactly the same reaction you’d get from directly taking exogenous testosterone. If you ever come off finasteride, your test levels will immediately drop, and may or may not ever return to normal. If you’ve been taking finasteride for a very long time, it would be unlikely for your testosterone levels to ever return to what they were pre-finasteride.

[seper8]

I see you added "which you’re not going to notice unless you ever stop taking it."

[AmericanChopper]

I didn't edit my comment if that's what you're saying...

Taking moderate doses of steroids is also massively beneficial in many ways, with the worst of the side effects typically occurring if you stop taking them. But a lifelong dependency on a drug with a long list of adverse side effects is not a good thing, especially when ceasing treatment has its own long list of potential side effects.

Finasteride does suppress your natural testosterone production. If you intend to take it every day for the rest of your life, and are happy to gamble that you don’t get any of the other side effects, then maybe you’re happy taking that risk. But this is clearly not an ideal treatment, and I suspect most people who are prescribed it aren’t properly informed about these risks.

[seper8]

I fully agree with the risk factor, I was even on it for some time and discontinued the use because of the risks involved. But the risks were (to my limited understanding) less associated with testosterone, but rather the decrease in dht. And the potential effect that it has on your sexual life

[AmericanChopper]

Yes, you're right about that. I'm just trying to note that there is no guarantee that ceasing treatment would reverse those side effects (if you happened to have them), or that it wouldn't create other also-bad side effects.

Hormone treatments are very scary, and I think people are far too casual about them. You usually take a hormone treatment to affect one thing that the hormone does, but it probably also does 100 other things that you might not want to interfere with, and those 100 other things probably also affect many other things downstream themselves. Your body probably also regulates production of that hormone in some way, so now you're also probably interfering with god knows what upstream from that hormone production. Some of these effects are well understood by medicine, but plenty of them aren't, and even for the ones that are, there's no way of predicting how you're going to react personally. They're a very blunt tool in that respect, and I think most people who take finasteride, or TRT, or birth control, or beta blockers, or even things like topical steroids aren't helped much to properly understand how they work, and all the ways the treatments can go wrong, including the ways that they can form dependencies on the treatment.

[seethedeaduu]

DHT is poison

[TeaBrain]

There have been a number of studies suggesting that DHT is neuroprotective.

Neuroprotection by dihydrotestosterone in LPS-induced neuroinflammation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096999612....

Neuroprotection of dihydrotestosterone via suppression of the toll-like receptor 4/nuclear factor-kappa B signaling pathway in high glucose-induced BV-2 microglia inflammatory responses https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31876682/

[AmericanChopper]

If (adult) DHT was only bad, then you wouldn’t see any adverse side effects from blocking its synthesis. DHT is just an androgen receptor agonist, its effects in adult male biology are not understood very well, including the reasons why DHT blockers (absolutely do) cause a number of adverse side effects.

[CRConrad]

Typo for DJT?

[seethedeaduu]

No

[CRConrad]

Sigh. I was hoping not to have to add a "/s", "jk", or smiley.

[seethedeaduu]

Idk what a DJT is.

[CRConrad]

Donald J. Trump.