Comment by svilen_dobrev
2 days ago
So how the usual otherwise-harmless treatment with extract of Serenoa repens works? Seems even that is not clear - [1] is ~2011, [2] is 2024
it seemed to work for me, took it for few months, 10y+ ago. "Lasted" 8-9 years.. - until recently..
There is a reason we are smart enough to develop finasteride and dutasteride that are extremely effective and safe¹ instead of relying on plants & herbs which are just weak versions of taking a drug anyway.
¹ the science is sound, the safety is absolutely a guarantee. There is a group of about 10 individuals who have spent their entire life spreading their neurological issues and obsession with fake reports and exaggerations of the harmful made-up side effects that cannot be repeated in any study whatsoever anywhere..
I actually could not believe the other day that they are still active and have managed to cause the FDA to issue a guidance that there might be higher side effect rates than otherwise were reported .
It's actually ridiculous, and every news article and study about it are almost entirely mentioning people who's just start believing in their heads that they have side effects when they actually don't. And yet the news articles took this as evidence of a story that has been hidden or something .
I really thought that those 10 or so individuals who you used to be able to read their forum posts back in 2006 when they tried to tell every young guy in the world not to take it for hair loss would have fizzled out by now.
Finasteride does seem to be able to cause some issues. It seems that DHT has many protective roles in the body and limiting it may cause problems: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7308241/
Finasteride was discovered because of a tribe in south america with a high frequency of a mutant allele in the gene responsible for protein that converts T to DHT. They had no BPH. This led to the search for a competitive inhibitor of that enzyme.While under patent it was extremely lucrative to big pharma. The incentives of fame and greed will continue to plague our civilization as long as we embrace aggregating structures like corporations, advertising, social media, and instant worldwide communication to amplify human traits that were useful in small scale tribes.