Pharma and their dupes want to castrate you or steal your ovaries

What is said of Finasteride has been shown to be true of the others related patented drugs. Thus most if not all of the drugs used to treat BPH, male pattern boldness, and chemical castrate patients with prostate cancer have the same family of drugs, though of course their manufacturers claim a difference, and their dupes repeat it to patients.   

Two things:  One I would not take the drugs prescribed for BPH, benign prostatic hyperplasia; and two undergo a biopsy of the prostate.  The journal articles below and my commentary reveal why.  This is what I would do and have done.  I am not recommending  others to do as I did.  Oh, and as for ovaries, as part of the hysterectomy the surgen believes (thank you pharma) that the ovaries are of no use and so he should take them on the mistaken belief that it will lower the risk of cancer of the breast and of course it prevents ovarian cancer (a fairly rare one).  What he isn’t informed in CME classes or medical textbooks is the effect of near zero estrogens is that it raises the risk modestly of breast cancer, and very significantly of osteoporosis, sarcopenia (muscle loss),  obesity, heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, thin wrinkled skin, pendulous breasts and other unwanted effects.  A low level of the estrogens is better than a near zero level, and a youthful level of natural HRT is wonderful, but bad for pharma.  Dyskinesia

General warning:  About pharma-funded clinical trials:  there is always scientific fraud in such trials.  Pharma (the drug manufacturer) owns the trial raw data and won’t share their results, which is used for the journal articles.  Thus a peer reviewer can’t see where the fraud, called positive bias occurred.  However, this has been repeatedly and consistently found when as through a court case the raw data is made public.  See one rare such exposure where the Positive bias  averaged 32% for 74 journal articles. 

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Finasteride (sold as Propecia and Proscar]) blocks the conversion of testosterone (TTT) to dihydrotestosterone (DT), and is sold on the basis that it reduces male pattern hair bolding and the size of a large prostate, a condition called BPH (benign prostazte hyperplastia) based on the theory that DT causes both. 

The scientifically aimed bullet to fix BPH and male pattern baldness:  Finasteride is one of a family of drug which blocks testosterone (TTT) conversion to dihydrotestosterone (DT) by blocking partially 5-alph-reductase, and thus reducing supposedly only DT.  Sound great, only affecting DT, whose main function is masculinization, and thus not affecting the very significant TTT of mature men.  This biochemical razzal-dazzal is generated by the manufacturer Merck.  Merck does the research and creates the method of action (this is the business norm for pharma).  Finasteride likely affects much more, but the literature is lacking.  And since the drug is taken for years, long term evidence is essential for an evaluation.  And it stays in the body much longer than its half-life because “As an unconjugated steroid, Finasteride is a highly lipophilic compound” Wiki.  Having said that and given its many side effects, which include loss of libido, impotency, depression, and thus lower quality of life and stress upon spouse.  These side effect persist and are very common, thus given the label ‘post-finasteride syndeome’[1]  Given the side effects it must lower the production of TTT.  There are other long-term side effects since TTT and estradiol (which about 10% of TTT is converted to).  Both are important to health, they significantly lower the risk for heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, dementia, arthritis, and others   The magic DT bullet is a shot-gun blast to our hormonal regulators.

FDA approval: uses patented include for hair loss and BHP (benign prostatic hyperplasia).  All the drug have to do is be a couple of percent better than nothing at all (a placebo) for approval, and rarely are side effects sufficient for denial of a patent.  Welcome to the world of regulatory façade.  A few other regulatory agencies have taken stronger action than a black-bock warning:  The Swedish Medical Products agency concluded a safety investigation of finasteride and advised that finasteride may cause irreversible sexual dysfunction. Similar reports were issued for UK and Italy.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finasteride

As for preventing prostate cancer, the numbers are based on an aggressive use of “adenocarcinoma’; viz., calling benign tumors cancer based upon abnormal nuclei.  Low TTT has been repeatedly shown in population studies to be significantly associated with aggressive prostate cancer; thus, no surprisingly, the rate of aggressive prostate cancer increased by 27%, as expected.  

Extending the use of their patented drugs, to this end pharma does clinical trials which are always flawed by design—a point proven by Prof. Ben Goldacre in his book Bad Pharma.  A new use would be to take the drug to reduce the risk for prostate cancer, which has a 3% lifetime risk.  The drug manufacturer has done a very large trial (18,800 men) to “prove” that Finasteride reduces the rate of prostate cancer.  Published in the NEJM 2013 it “showed” about 1/3 case reduction: thus 100 would have to take it lifetime for 1 to avoid prostate cancer.  There are several down sides to this use of a Finasteride.  One is that it increases the risk of high grade prostate cancer by 16.4%.  (Again I remind you that those numbers favor the drug manufacturer—positive bias).  Merck’s trial showed that at 15 years the total survival of the placebo group was slightly higher than that of those given prophylactic Finasteride.  So why take a drug that doesn’t extend life and has terrible side effects.  Add to this the 32% positive bias average (above) and it shortens life significantly. 

Even the highest figures for side effects are deceptive.  A 2017 review of men with BPH found that “Overall, 5ARIs determined an increased risk of hypoactive sexual desire [very low libido][OR = 1.54 (1.29; 1.82); p < 0.0001] and erectile dysfunction [OR = 1.47 (1.29; 1.68); p < 0.0001].    Two of that class were tested, “No difference between finasteride and dutasteride. . . .”   An IR if 1.54 means 54% have major decline is sex drive (thus who are young enough to have a sex drive), and 47% can’t get an erection.  Since the drug has gone off patent, pharma will be switch him to a new improve 5-alpha reductase inhibitor, and he might be told of those high rates so as to switch his prescribing.  (There is a saying:  “It is amazing how quickly a good drug becomes a bad drug when it goes off patent”.)  The doctor will likely be told of the study used on rxlist.com for the new drug in which it has 0.6% of men in the trail experience abnormal sexual function, 4.1% impotence more than the placebo group.  And it gets much worse, for one thing the question asked of the men in the trial and circumstance are not supplied, the company which funded the study writes it up and has their KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) sign off on it and as part of the contract they give up the right to violate the company’s privacy clause.  One way to put the question to get the desired answer would be to first use a cohort that is not sexual active, thus in their 60s and 70s most men have zero sex with their wife.  Secondly if the sex goes from an average of once a month to zero, that isn’t a significant decline that is drug caused rather caused  by aging and andropause.  The uses of “significant” in a survey, rather than having a log of pretreatment, during treatment, and post treatment sexual encounters is a clincher.  This is scientific fraud when the method of getting a pro-business result is not revealed in the journal article.  Relying on memory with an embarising question promotes the pro-business answer.  What 90% of doctors believe about 5-alpha reductase inhibitors benefits and its side effects are worlds apart.   These dupes are taught that hormones are bad, thus women don’t need their ovaries once past bearing children or the hormones they produce; and men don’t need TTT, DT, or their testes and prostate, moreover without them cancer risks go down, for both men and women, and without affecting quality of life or causing other health problems.  We all suffer because pharma isn’t blocked from the education process which includes the public through corporate media.    

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Prof. Marcia Angell, Harvard: “We certainly are in a health care crisis, ... If we had set out to design the worst system that we could imagine, we couldn't have imagined one as bad as we have.” Her excellent 77 minute lecture on pharma http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqKY6Gr6D3Q