#finasteride

im taking 1mg a day finasteride, sometimes forgetting to take it, and i got mine from AllDayChemist. tthe effects i've noticed are first, that my nails are now growing annoyingly fast, but unfortunately they dont seem very strong so i have to cut or file them every couple days. this seems promising because as recently as a couple years ago i was still growing genetically long, strong nails just like my mom and my nail decline over the past couple years seems to suggest some sort of problem with them.

as for hair, i already have very long hair, and it's properly spiral curly, so determining exactly how much longer it has gotten in a period of time can be tricky, but i THINK it is also growing faster. when it's wet in the shower is when i can see where it is reaching relative to my back/hips, and it seems like it has grown back down to my tailbone very quickly since the last trim. I also see a lot of baby hairs around the observable areas on my hairline, and my widow's peak (which has always been very defined even when i was a kid, it's not a pattern baldness widow's peak) has a handful of what look like new hairs that are the appropriate length to have started growing since i started finasteride. also, and this is the biggest relief, when i brush my hair i am shedding a LOT less. like maybe 20-30% of the hair that i used to lose in my hairbrush is there now. i initially started this finasteride experiment because my shedding was getting so bad and i was noticing significant volume loss, so only seeing a fraction of the hairball size in my hairbrush as i used to is really great

naturally i neglected to take any "before" photos because im just not that organized, so my data sucks.

as for other effects.....i really havent noticed any at all. my brain fog is bad all day everyday at my baseline, so it's possible that anything finasteride is contributing is just being lost in the background noise. however, on the other hand, the obsessive self-monitoring of the sick person may also mean im in a good position to notice that kind of thing. i dont know.

i think my eyelashes are being affected positively. i forgot to take finasteride for about three days last week and noticed that i lost about six eyelashes that day, so i think they were finasteride lashes but who knows.

as for feminizing effects, like i said, i usually pluck my beard hairs (im fem-presenting rn) on about a monthly basis, and i have about four or five of them on my chin, and a peach fuzz mustache with five or six darker hairs that i shave or pluck sometimes too. since starting finasteride most of the beard hairs just havent grown in. i haven't noticed any breast tenderness or body feminization, i think i look about the same naked as i always do, so i dont think im getting any body fat redistribution either. i havent noticed any sexual effects either but i'm in a semi-asexual period at the moment anyway so im not sure how much i would notice finasteride changing that stuff anyway.

i think the online drug effects anecdotes are a valuable source of data, but that the data is generally low quality. the people reporting on what they think are side effects are extremely impressionable and also suck at noticing confounding factors, and stuff that's very personal and very psychological like erectile dysfunction are basically impossible to get good data for outside of a lab. it's one of the most vulnerable factors to placebo/nocebo effects, and erectile function declines with age anyway at about the same time people start taking finasteride, so i just dont think reddit posts are trustworthy on this topic. someone could easily have turned 35, started taking finasteride because they were losing enough hair for it to bother them (normal at that age), and then also started experiencing age-related erection decline at the same time for reasons unrelated to finasteride, and just done the human thing of associating the two unrelated events. on the other hand hormones are weird and theres every reason to expect an exogenous drug thats doing stuff to your "masculine" endogenous hormones could affect your penits. its not unrealistic at all.

drug companies bend over backwards to hide side effects that only come to light many years after a large general population is exposed to a drug. so i dont think you can discount this stuff either. i just tend to assume most of the reddit side effects are partially bad data and partially exaggerated, even as i take them seriously.

in conclusion hormones are truly weird and have unpredictable effects. i think it's probably not the case that trialing a low dose of finasteride for a few months would permanently damage you, but i cant state that with certainty because idk,. shit happens and there are edge cases for everything.