You made it seem as if all anti-Finasteride people think 100% of the people who use Finasteride would get sides, which isn't the case.
Also, it's way more than 15% that get sides on Finasteride. More than 30% even. Probably even between 40 to 50%.
If it was only 15% then why would a forum like this which had a poll with Real people who are both pro and anti-Finasteride (not mice) show 55% voted to say they actually had side effects.
Also, besides the forum poll, there's been many studies proving this and not just in mice.
Also, it's ironic you should talk about legitimacy of studies when both Merck and the FDA have been found to not be trustworthy on many many occasions.
Ya'll can have double blind studies and still have data manipulated by Big Pharma so not sure what your point is.
Let's look at the Food and Drug Administration’s failure to protect the 170 million Americans who take prescription drugs from adverse reactions that are killing more than 2,400 people every week. Annually, prescription drugs cause over 81 million adverse reactions and result in 2.7 million...
www.healthaffairs.org
Americans trust that drugs approved by the FDA are safe, but this is not always the case. We hear from advocate Kim Witczak, who lost her husband in 2003.
www.drugwatch.com
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is supposed to protect Americans from harmful drugs. But in reality, FDA-approval does not guarantee safety. Critics say Big Pharma funds FDA reviews of new drugs, creating a conflict of interest. The agency is too focused on approving drugs to appease Big Pharma and it lacks the proper authority and funding to protect the public"
Like I always say, Big Pharma secretly funds trials. It's pretty obvious the FDA can't be trusted as well as those pro-Finasteride studies which can easily be secretly funded by Big Pharma, especially when theres so many studies that prove completely opposite results showing how bad Finasteride truly can be.
Even Merck themselves admit not knowing what the long term effects are for younger men in their official FDA approval letter:
Most of those "independent" studies about Finasteride that happen to also be pro-Finasteride results are from dermatologists aka the ones who prescribe it, there's a conflict of interest with many of them.
And a meta analysis has been done:
Adverse Event Reporting in Clinical Trials of Finasteride for Androgenic Alopecia: A Meta-analysis
Conclusions and relevance: Available toxicity information from clinical trials of finasteride in men with Androgenetic Alopecia is very limited, is of poor quality, and seems to be systematically biased. In a cohort of men prescribed finasteride for routine treatment of Androgenetic Alopecia, most would have been excluded from the pivotal studies that supported US Food and Drug Administration approval for Androgenetic Alopecia. Published reports of clinical trials provide insufficient information to establish the safety profile for finasteride in the treatment of Androgenetic Alopecia.
Available toxicity information from clinical trials of finasteride in men with Androgenetic Alopecia is very limited, is of poor quality, and seems to be systematically biased. In a cohort of men prescribed finasteride for routine treatment of Androgenetic Alopecia, most would have been excluded from the pivotal studies that...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Also another interesting article about the "pharma conspiracy" from Harvard:
by Donald W. Light A forthcoming article for the special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), edited by Marc Rodwin and supported by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, presents evidence that about 90 percent of all new drugs approved by the FDA over the past 30 years are...
ethics.harvard.edu
"The bar for “safe” is equally low, and over the past 30 years, approved drugs have caused an epidemic of harmful side effects, even when properly prescribed. Every week, about 53,000 excess hospitalizations and about 2400 excess deaths occur in the United States among people taking properly prescribed drugs to be healthier.
Prescription drugs are the 4th leading cause of death.
This evidence indicates why we can no longer trust the FDA to carry out its historic mission to protect the public from harmful and ineffective drugs. Strong public demand that government “do something” about periodic drug disasters has played a central role in developing the FDA.2 Yet close, constant contact by companies with FDA staff and officials has contributed to vague, minimal criteria of what “safe” and “effective” mean."