I'm a bit worried again, i was digging old post of this forum and i felt on this :
http://www.hairlosstalk.com/interact/showthread.php/45157-Equol/page21?highlight=equol
on post #206 it says:
"Propecia will actually become your worst enemy if you take it for a long time because your hair will become overly sensitive, all you do is built up something like a dam and after this dam gets cracks you are in serious trouble." among other things... is dis true ??
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I would guess the answer is a heavily a qualified "yes." What I mean is that I've seen guys on here who have taken propecia upwards of ten years, maybe longer, and that has never happened to them; but I'm sure it's happened to someone.
The question is if that "fragility" reported is really attributable to propecia. I'm willing to believe most of the bad stuff I hear about the drug, like most of us who are terrified; my only consolation is that it is as close to "confirmed" as can be that in the short-and-medium term, lingering catastrophic effects (impotence, gyno, "the cracking dam") are statistically rare. I'm not sure it's only a fraction of the 1-2% reported whose sides were serious enough to discontinue use; but it's probably not higher than 1-2% at the highest estimate.
For some people that is acceptable risk; for others not. I've always been a bit heedless (I'm a smoker, though I've cut down significantly with ecigs over the past year), and for what I perceive as large gains I'm willing to tolerate huge risk at a sufficiently low probability. (But you know what they say: one man's "sufficiently low" is another's "f**k no").
I can tell you now I'm on day five and I still feel weird, physically speaking. No ED-type problems at all, not even ball-soreness. But damn my body is achy - really odd sharp pains all over, but particularly in the upper arms and - surprise, surprise - the chest/breasts area. I'm tempted to put up a post asking if this is something that happens to some people early on; if not, I can write it off as something else. In any case, make no mistake: I'm still terrified of gyno (that's my bugbear, as I mentioned above). But at least I'm aware that that is the risk I'm taking and I've made the choice with my eyes open.
Every time I start to doubt my decision, I find myself getting out of the shower and seeing my hair wet in the mirror. Like magic, this removes all doubts. There's maybe a bit of pathology there, maybe even a sad sort of broken vanity. My point being not to express self-pity but to note that maybe a little c-r-a-z-y, a little oomph of pathology, is required to swallow this stuff day after day. For me, that oomph was a suddenly shattered self-image after a revealing haircut. I hardly recognized myself, and I was terrified of getting to the point where I'd look in the mirror every day and disgustedly sneer, "Who the hell are you?"
For others that may not be enough; for me, it was. I think one of the things that kept me lurking here for months before I made the fateful decision was my hope that someone on propecia would reveal a comforting piece of information that would put me at ease. Hope against hope. That revelation never came, and I'm not even sure what I wanted to hear. Probably just wanted it all to be a nightmare and have an angel hand me the pills, telling me "Guaranteed safe by the Big Guy Himself," while stringing his harp. I don't know. We're all just in a sh*t situation. On top of the sh*t of the balding, there's the sh*t of the insane things we have to do to even modestly fight back against it. Any move requires a leap of faith we'd rather make with a bit more knowledge and certainty.
But to return to your initial concern, I really wouldn't add to your worries with the cracking dam thing. Most of our dams are already well-nigh cracked anyway; I'd be more than happy to let it collapse ten years down the line (not that I'd love that either, but it's better than now).
