Why Did Finasteride Make Me Feel So Good?

[ContinuousHeal]

I have a long saga with Finasteride use, including approximately 7 years of what I would call successful use, and a nearly 5 year battle with the damage the drug ultimately caused.

I've made a lot of progress, but one thing always sticks with me is how great I felt for the bulk of the first 7 years. It was from more than just an attitude perspective, but even hormonally. I was energized, positive, sexual, and had excellent gains at the gym. All better than I was prior to taking the drug. For me this continued almost constantly, until my career began to get more stressful, and the earliest signs were a pounding heart and irrational nervousness heading into meetings, however still feeling relatively good.

The turning point was making a career change into a new company and an extremely stressful role. Within weeks I noticed sores forming on my scalp, and a rapid elevation of the anxiety like symptoms. Months later I developed a dull pain in one of my testicles (which also began to constantly sag), and my doctor had nothing to tell me. That dull pain continued for 6-9 months, while my libido and general health plummeted. My bones felt weak, my energy levels were shot, and I began to experience the early signs of impotence and loss of libido.

From here the story becomes more typical. By the time I decided to stop the drug, I was losing hair regardless of it, and knew something was clearly wrong. Stopping the drug, quitting my job and spending a year in a nearly paralyzed state of anxiety and low energy, and long slow climb back to some form of normalcy. My first big breakthrough was supplementing phosphatidylserine, which seemed to return nerve activity to the scrotum, and significantly improve my sleep quality. My success here began my online research into allopregnenalone, and ultimately to this website.

Long story short, I know fin has been likened to a form of preg, but how was it that I felt so good? Was this a delicate balance of feeling what a special type of pregnenalone supplement (one that maybe was more effective at boosting androgens?) at the expense of a reduced stress tolerance, which only became an issue when my life got chronically more stressful?

I know no easy answers here, but I wanted to get my story out.

 

[sladerunner69]

Many post-finasteride victims don't feel the ill effects until they come off the dangerous drug and experience the "crash". Many people can handle the drug with seemingly little to no consequence when taking the recommended dosages daily, or maybe are only experiencing some comparitively minor issues like a bit lower libido and waking in the night, for example. Then they decide to try stopping it and WHAM they experience the living hell nightmare that is pfs. And then there are many guys who experience really rough symptoms while on the drug (such as myself) and when they come off, they experience an even nastier less merciful crash that keeps them bed-ridden and weeping for months (such as myself).

I guess you may have been one of the outliers who could handle the drug with no ill effects, and your confidence and demeanor led you to living a stimualting life which is an important part of the peat paradigm. When the damage the drug was causing slowly caught up to you, coupled with the stress from work, it all became clear that you were not in good shape. Very few things in the health world are cut and dry.

 

[ContinuousHeal]

Thanks for the response. My case is also weird in that I cannot say for sure that I even experienced a crash as I've heard it described. I know things felt as bad as ever in the time when I stopped taking the drug, but things were already terrible by the time I stopped. I was experiencing the PTSD like symptoms of allo deficiency, and all but losing all feeling or nerve connection in the penis. I'll never forget the tingling feeling I had in my scrotum within a couple of weeks after stopping the drug. It was as if the nerves were slowly reconnecting. I'm still nothing like I was, even 5 years later, however at least some of the symptoms began to improve immediately upon stopping, and others (like the anxiety) have proven much harder to shake.

 

[Mauritio]

The answer is that nobody really knows what it does.
It increases a variety of hormones that are normally not that high.

User @ChemHead has an interesting theory on this site Oral Steroid Made My Hair Grow Back Thicker!
While Im not sure if its really a mineralocorticoid that is responsible for the benefits, I do like the idea that the 5aR inhibition causes a higher concentration of other hormoens, that have unquie and possibly beneficial effects, which could be investigated.

Based on this study I suggest it might be Epietiocholanolone a.k.a 5b-epiandrosterone, which is a testosterone metabolite and increased by far the most (600%) out of all the hormones they measured, after finasteride supplementation.

Found it, this study is crazy. Look at allopreg holy ***t...

http://www.lf1.cuni.cz/Data/Files/PragueMedicalReport/pmr_110_2009_03/pmr2009a0025.pdf