Forum bros, apologies in advance for the lengthy post. I need your opinions.
Thank you in advance for all of your responses.
I would like to give as much info as I can here.
The beginning is a bit about my background, next is about when I went on TRT before finasteride, after that describes my crash, and the rest is about my experimental treatments and their results. Sorry if what I have written is disjointed or hard to follow in any way, but I want to give as much as I can in hopes that I might give clues to the person with the right knowledge to help me. I kept on adding in details and it got really long.
To give a more accurate picture of what my body is like, I need to talk about before I took finasteride:
In general, growing up, I had always been thin. I had done everything to try and gain muscle and did have some success, but it also came with water weight. Before I knew much about the endocrine system, I never thought that this may be estrogen at work.
In addition to what I see now as a sign of estrogen, I also had man boobs. It was mild, but it was enough to draw comments from people when I took off my shirt. I didn’t like that, so I eventually had lipo on the area. It did flatten out the area, but I still had water retention in the chest.
In addition to that, during my youth, I would have issues with ED during sex and low libido occasionally. MOST of the time this was not an issue though.
Now, enter the time period in which I began altering my hormones with drugs:
So, in Fall of 2013 (age 32), I was learning more about testosterone and thought that I had the signs of low T. I went to a doctor and found out mine was just over 300. I got on 250 mg per week TRT prescribed by an endocrinologist. I felt amazing consistently for the first time in my life. I felt so good that by the spring of 2014, I doubled my prescribed dose to 500 mg of T per week. During this time, I noticed that my ED was more frequent, only I didn’t tell my doctor because other than that I still felt great and the ED wasn’t so bad that it was ruining my sex life. I didn’t want anyone to take TRT away from me.
After 3-4 months of 500 mg per week, in July of 2014, I saw another doctor. He said my T levels were too high at 1500 and to knock the dose down to 200 mg per week. It was this same time that I realized that my hair was thinning much faster than before. My doctor said this would slow down if I lowered my dosage. I did that.
Fast forward to October. I was feeling better than ever. I had gotten in better shape than ever before and really strong. Still having minor ED problems but still not a life changing issue. However, my hair was still thinning so I called my doctor and he prescribed me finasteride.
Now enter the Finasteride phase of my timeline. After about a month and a half of being on finasteride, I notice that my hair is still falling out, but even more alarming was that my dick was really having problems. It seemed to be shrinking and was harder to get an erection. I did some looking around and found out that finasteride can cause permanent ED. I was really freaked out and quit right away.
Directly after quitting, I had all the hallmarks of post finasteride syndrome. After about 2 weeks of horrible ED where I was completely impotent, I experienced a full recovery. I felt amazing, even better than normal. After about 2 weeks of this, it became clear that I was waning and crashed again. I was devastated. I couldn’t sleep. I was having night sweats. Horrible depression. Very serious ED. Very little ejaculate when I could. This was January of 2015.
Over time I was able to have erections that weren’t very hard. My doctor said all of my hormone levels were in the normal range. He gave me cialis while I continued to TRT with HCG (my TRT always included HCG) This did very little for me. It would cause me to have faint nocturnal erections. I wasn’t having spontaneous erections and when I would stimulate myself, they were still only half erections and not good enough for sex.
By August of 2014 I was getting really worried it had been 6 months of this. I started trying different things. I’ll now go into the different things I tried and the results.
First I tried a water fast for 1 week. The day after I finished fasting, I went to sleep and woke up 15 minutes later with a rock hard erection. It was as if a switch was flipped on and I had all of my sensation back as well. I couldn’t believe it. The next day, it was gone.
Next, in October of 2015, I went to a new doctor. She put me on bio-identical test cream. After a few days I started having amazing erections. This lasted for almost a month but was fading until I went back to having severe ED. I stopped all hormone therapy.
January of 2016, I did another water fast for over a week. Near the end, I was having nocturnal erections and was able to get pretty normal erections. After the fast, I started on a ketogenic diet. I was still having nocturnal erections and better erections when I stimulated myself. This faded out after a few weeks.
March of 2016, after a week of eating only salad. I reintroduced carbs. I woke up one day and had an erection. I had them for about a week and then they faded away again.
April 2016, I went back to my original doctor to discuss going back on TRT. While he ordered my T, he gave me DHEA and Iodine tablets to start on in the meantime. I took that, and on the first day, I felt an improvement, then it got better over the next few days until I peaked. I felt amazing and was sleeping really well and my thinking cleared up. I thought I was cured because it lasted about 3-4 weeks.
May 2016, after going back to really poor erections again, I decided to start taking the testosterone that I had received the month before. It didn’t do anything. After a week of that, I bought some tribulus. I took 6 pills, and within 30 minutes I had a raging erection with full sensitivity. It was amazing. Taking tribulus continued to work for one week and then faded. I told this to my doctor and he said there is no way that this could have a physical effect so quickly, but I know it did. I have tried a lot of supplements and had no results. The tribulus immediately gave me that “switched on” feeling.
By early June of 2016, I was still on TRT. My levels were 1100 so we cut back my dose by half. In addition to that, I had been reading more about high estrogen symptoms. I had all of them. I was convinced that even though my Estrogen level was only 38.8, I was having effects of too much estrogen. My doctor wouldn’t hear it because he is very set in his ways treating people by their blood tests in the conventional way. I argued with him until he decided to give me a prescription of .5 mg of arimidex per week.
Now this is what really has me thinking… The first day I tried that .5 mg arimidex pill, it was amazing. Within 30 minutes, I had the greatest erection and sensitivity in recent memory. I forgot it could even be like that. It was like the amazing recovery I experienced with tribulus, but even better. I had two erections like that that day. The next day, I woke up with a faint erection and then flat-lined. I couldn’t get an erection at all for about 48 hours. My dick had definitely shrunk too. By the 3rd day after arimidex, I finally had some sort of erection and ejaculated a low volume. However, that small amount seemed to come directly out of my testicles. It was a very weird sensation where it was very difficult to ejaculate, and it just squeezed out. It was almost completely white, which was so strange because up until that point, my ejaculate had been very watery with little white.
Since then, my erections have been very poor. It is clear to me that my erections have been worse while on TRT. I told my doctor about the recovery with tribulus and arimidex. He says there is now way these things could act on my body so quickly and is quite condescending about it. I am 100% sure that they did cause these extreme reactions in me.
I am thinking about going off TRT or going off and coming back on with a lower dose and look at other ways to control estrogen.
I need to get advice from somewhere else, because my doctor is not listening to me and is leading me down the wrong path.
I know that many people have recovered from taking finasteride and were in the same boat as me, but all had different approaches to how they recovered.
I’d also like to add that I have a friend on a chat forum about post finasteride that is convinced that SERMs and herbs are the key to fix this, so I am throwing this in here in case anyone has some insight on this sort of treatment.
This is affecting my life tremendously. Not more than a couple of minutes at the most passes by when I don’t think about fixing this problem.
Thanks in advance for anyone who takes the time to read this and offer their insights.
Thank you in advance for all of your responses.
I would like to give as much info as I can here.
The beginning is a bit about my background, next is about when I went on TRT before finasteride, after that describes my crash, and the rest is about my experimental treatments and their results. Sorry if what I have written is disjointed or hard to follow in any way, but I want to give as much as I can in hopes that I might give clues to the person with the right knowledge to help me. I kept on adding in details and it got really long.
To give a more accurate picture of what my body is like, I need to talk about before I took finasteride:
In general, growing up, I had always been thin. I had done everything to try and gain muscle and did have some success, but it also came with water weight. Before I knew much about the endocrine system, I never thought that this may be estrogen at work.
In addition to what I see now as a sign of estrogen, I also had man boobs. It was mild, but it was enough to draw comments from people when I took off my shirt. I didn’t like that, so I eventually had lipo on the area. It did flatten out the area, but I still had water retention in the chest.
In addition to that, during my youth, I would have issues with ED during sex and low libido occasionally. MOST of the time this was not an issue though.
Now, enter the time period in which I began altering my hormones with drugs:
So, in Fall of 2013 (age 32), I was learning more about testosterone and thought that I had the signs of low T. I went to a doctor and found out mine was just over 300. I got on 250 mg per week TRT prescribed by an endocrinologist. I felt amazing consistently for the first time in my life. I felt so good that by the spring of 2014, I doubled my prescribed dose to 500 mg of T per week. During this time, I noticed that my ED was more frequent, only I didn’t tell my doctor because other than that I still felt great and the ED wasn’t so bad that it was ruining my sex life. I didn’t want anyone to take TRT away from me.
After 3-4 months of 500 mg per week, in July of 2014, I saw another doctor. He said my T levels were too high at 1500 and to knock the dose down to 200 mg per week. It was this same time that I realized that my hair was thinning much faster than before. My doctor said this would slow down if I lowered my dosage. I did that.
Fast forward to October. I was feeling better than ever. I had gotten in better shape than ever before and really strong. Still having minor ED problems but still not a life changing issue. However, my hair was still thinning so I called my doctor and he prescribed me finasteride.
Now enter the Finasteride phase of my timeline. After about a month and a half of being on finasteride, I notice that my hair is still falling out, but even more alarming was that my dick was really having problems. It seemed to be shrinking and was harder to get an erection. I did some looking around and found out that finasteride can cause permanent ED. I was really freaked out and quit right away.
Directly after quitting, I had all the hallmarks of post finasteride syndrome. After about 2 weeks of horrible ED where I was completely impotent, I experienced a full recovery. I felt amazing, even better than normal. After about 2 weeks of this, it became clear that I was waning and crashed again. I was devastated. I couldn’t sleep. I was having night sweats. Horrible depression. Very serious ED. Very little ejaculate when I could. This was January of 2015.
Over time I was able to have erections that weren’t very hard. My doctor said all of my hormone levels were in the normal range. He gave me cialis while I continued to TRT with HCG (my TRT always included HCG) This did very little for me. It would cause me to have faint nocturnal erections. I wasn’t having spontaneous erections and when I would stimulate myself, they were still only half erections and not good enough for sex.
By August of 2014 I was getting really worried it had been 6 months of this. I started trying different things. I’ll now go into the different things I tried and the results.
First I tried a water fast for 1 week. The day after I finished fasting, I went to sleep and woke up 15 minutes later with a rock hard erection. It was as if a switch was flipped on and I had all of my sensation back as well. I couldn’t believe it. The next day, it was gone.
Next, in October of 2015, I went to a new doctor. She put me on bio-identical test cream. After a few days I started having amazing erections. This lasted for almost a month but was fading until I went back to having severe ED. I stopped all hormone therapy.
January of 2016, I did another water fast for over a week. Near the end, I was having nocturnal erections and was able to get pretty normal erections. After the fast, I started on a ketogenic diet. I was still having nocturnal erections and better erections when I stimulated myself. This faded out after a few weeks.
March of 2016, after a week of eating only salad. I reintroduced carbs. I woke up one day and had an erection. I had them for about a week and then they faded away again.
April 2016, I went back to my original doctor to discuss going back on TRT. While he ordered my T, he gave me DHEA and Iodine tablets to start on in the meantime. I took that, and on the first day, I felt an improvement, then it got better over the next few days until I peaked. I felt amazing and was sleeping really well and my thinking cleared up. I thought I was cured because it lasted about 3-4 weeks.
May 2016, after going back to really poor erections again, I decided to start taking the testosterone that I had received the month before. It didn’t do anything. After a week of that, I bought some tribulus. I took 6 pills, and within 30 minutes I had a raging erection with full sensitivity. It was amazing. Taking tribulus continued to work for one week and then faded. I told this to my doctor and he said there is no way that this could have a physical effect so quickly, but I know it did. I have tried a lot of supplements and had no results. The tribulus immediately gave me that “switched on” feeling.
By early June of 2016, I was still on TRT. My levels were 1100 so we cut back my dose by half. In addition to that, I had been reading more about high estrogen symptoms. I had all of them. I was convinced that even though my Estrogen level was only 38.8, I was having effects of too much estrogen. My doctor wouldn’t hear it because he is very set in his ways treating people by their blood tests in the conventional way. I argued with him until he decided to give me a prescription of .5 mg of arimidex per week.
Now this is what really has me thinking… The first day I tried that .5 mg arimidex pill, it was amazing. Within 30 minutes, I had the greatest erection and sensitivity in recent memory. I forgot it could even be like that. It was like the amazing recovery I experienced with tribulus, but even better. I had two erections like that that day. The next day, I woke up with a faint erection and then flat-lined. I couldn’t get an erection at all for about 48 hours. My dick had definitely shrunk too. By the 3rd day after arimidex, I finally had some sort of erection and ejaculated a low volume. However, that small amount seemed to come directly out of my testicles. It was a very weird sensation where it was very difficult to ejaculate, and it just squeezed out. It was almost completely white, which was so strange because up until that point, my ejaculate had been very watery with little white.
Since then, my erections have been very poor. It is clear to me that my erections have been worse while on TRT. I told my doctor about the recovery with tribulus and arimidex. He says there is now way these things could act on my body so quickly and is quite condescending about it. I am 100% sure that they did cause these extreme reactions in me.
I am thinking about going off TRT or going off and coming back on with a lower dose and look at other ways to control estrogen.
I need to get advice from somewhere else, because my doctor is not listening to me and is leading me down the wrong path.
I know that many people have recovered from taking finasteride and were in the same boat as me, but all had different approaches to how they recovered.
I’d also like to add that I have a friend on a chat forum about post finasteride that is convinced that SERMs and herbs are the key to fix this, so I am throwing this in here in case anyone has some insight on this sort of treatment.
This is affecting my life tremendously. Not more than a couple of minutes at the most passes by when I don’t think about fixing this problem.
Thanks in advance for anyone who takes the time to read this and offer their insights.