Well, my story is this: I started on 1mg ED, and I did that for about two months. At that I point I suddenly got very ill with an (I think) unrelated case of chronic gastritis. I was also having some pretty depressing sides like occasional ED, very soft erections, and very watery sperm.
I decided to cut down to .5mg ED and see if that helped. I felt like it was fine, side effects-wise, for a few months, but then my gastritis flared up again, and I simply didn't want to do anything more to exacerbate it. So finally I settled on .5mg EOD.
The good: My sides are gone. I get an occasional ball ache, but my erections are fine and my sperm looks passably normal again.
The bad: Obviously, this raises my suspicion that it's not working anymore. More than that, my hair is noticeably worse than it was eight months ago when I began propecia. I was a Norwood 3 when I started, with thinning on the top, and I may be a Norwood 3.5 now with a much thinner top. I can't even cover it up anymore when I get a bad haircut. Very depressing.
I really don't know if it's working or not, long story short. It's done wonders for the side effects. Otherwise, my sense is that it's not really doing much. I've heard others say 8 months isn't long enough to see results, so of course I'll stick it out (nothing to lose).
Oh, and one more thing - Whenever I heard people talk about "sheds" I got the image of clumps of hair falling out in the shower, on the pillow, etc. Evidently this is what happens with a lot of people. What's odd in my experience is that I never notice any shedding hair - granted, I don't fiddle with my hair too much, but in the shower there's never clumps, and not on the pillow either. I simply notice my hair is thinner; considerably thinner.
This is more of a question, in addition to OPs: Do people in fact "shed" sometimes without noticing with "clumps of hair" that they are shedding? Maybe, just maybe, my hair looks so bad now because I'm going through a shed... That would be better than the alternative: .5mg isn't working.
