[0:00]What's up, chooms? How do you all living? Hope everything is nova with you all today, and you're all having a preem week. So, picture this. Imagine you are a hair-loss noob, and you look in the mirror one day, only to find out that your hairline is receding. Or maybe you notice your hair looks a bit more diffuse than it normally does, or perhaps you notice a bald patch developing on the crown. You then decide to call up your doctor, who may refer you to a dermatologist, who after examining you, will diagnose you with the dreaded curse known as Androgenic Alopecia. He or she will then tell you about how there is this evil trash hormone called DHT, Dihydrotestosterone, which of course is a worthless byproduct of testosterone that does have some role during maturation and puberty. But following that is an active outside of the scalp, prostate, and skin, where it only does bad things like give you acne, enlarge your prostate, and of course cause hair loss. This news may be unsettling at first, but then your doctor will tell you some great news. There is a wonderful drug called Finasteride that can preserve testosterone, the hormone which makes us men. By blocking the 5A reductase enzyme, which is the enzyme that lowers the Alpha Chad hormone testosterone by converting it into the Beta Bitch Virgin hormone DHT. By doing this, not only do we preserve more of the good hormone testosterone, but we lower the trash hormone DHT on the scalp, which can completely stop your hair loss and even regrow some of your hair. Best of all, the side effects are extremely rare, and even if you do get them, you can most often mitigate them through titration adjustments, as it has been shown that Finasteride taken at 0.5 milligrams daily is almost as effective as the standard dose of 1 milligram daily, as half a milligram will only suppress about 8% or so less DHT than 1 milligram. So, upon hearing this great news, you go ahead and get a prescription from your doctor for Finasteride, and you just take your pills as you would take an aspirin, and just forget about hair loss forever, and you get on with your life. Simple, right? Well, this is what a smart responsible person would do. They just listen to their damn doctor and do what they're told. But sadly, we're living in the era of the Internet and social media, where every dumb shit gets a soapbox to preach, and that sadly leads to a lot of fearmongering and misinformation. So, the big problem with this is that when people are faced with hair loss or any other medical dilemma, rather than being responsible and first speaking with a medical professional, they'll instead defer judgment to toxic, resentful online communities, who will spread as much fearmongering and misinformation bullshit about Finasteride as they possibly can in order to dissuade people out of fighting their hair loss. Most of these Finasteride haters usually fall under two categories. The first group of people are those who never used Finasteride, and their hair is now beyond any hope of saving. So, why they never started Finasteride could be due to a myriad of reasons. I mean, you know, they may be have been too scared to start, or they may have just been too lazy and blew it off for too long until it was too late. And it could also be that many of them didn't even know there was anything that that they could do about it until after they went bald, and they're pissed off that other people don't want to be bald and miserable like they are. I mean, after all, misery really loves company, or maybe they just took the blue pill and convinced themselves that being bald isn't a cosmetic defect, and they could just shave it, bro, and look like the small handful of bald celebrities they always bring up when trying to convince people that being bald looks good, even though these celebrities that they keep bringing up look good in spite of being bald, not because of it. And even men who look good bald would still look better if they had hair. And, you know, although if you ask me, I think most of these bald guys still look pretty bad. I mean, Vin Diesel looks like a disease turtle in my opinion. Hair is what frames a handsome face after all. Anyways, the second group of people are those who were very scared to start Finasteride and probably should have sought psychiatric help, but instead decided to take Finasteride anyways. Rather than just taking the pill like an aspirin and forgetting about it, they've they they just totally let their fears consume them to the point where they imagined something must be wrong and they give themselves an acbo effect. I am well aware of this because early in my Finasteride journey, I was the same way, unfortunately. Back when I was a hair loss noob who wasn't as well-read on the subject as I am today, I read a lot of horror stories online. None of these anecdotes that I read were backed by any scientific evidence whatsoever, but they were presented with a strong enough level of emotion that I still nevertheless found them convincing. So, while on Finasteride, all I would do was just think about Finasteride and all the horrible things it can do for me, rather than focus on all the wonderful things the drug actually does. So suddenly, everything that happened to me that I may have taken for granted before, I would instantly blame on Finasteride, while ignoring any other potential factor. If there was anything that happened to my life that I didn't like, that was negative in even the slightest bit, I would instantly jump to the conclusion that it must have been the Finasteride. The side effects people claim that Finasteride causes, like depression, low libido, libido, or erectile dysfunction, are very rare side effects, but they're also highly multifactorial, not to mention very common issues.
[5:08]It's been reported that as many as 30% of men will experience some degree of erectile dysfunction at one time or another. So, just because you are experiencing these symptoms, doesn't necessarily mean that it was the Finasteride that caused them. However, since these are possible side effects, we can't completely dismiss the people who claim Finasteride caused these side effects as well. Like I said though, people who get sides should not go online for medical advice. Instead, they should talk to their doctor who can adjust their dosage to mitigate these side effects. However, fearmongering about Finasteride has gone well beyond fear over the small potential of legitimate side effects. Whole communities of conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones types, and bro scientists whose fears about Finasteride have led to a completely delusional pattern of thinking where anything bad they can possibly imagine must be because of Finasteride, have popped up all over online. We now have people claiming that Finasteride has caused straight men to turn into gay men or has turned cisgender men into trans women, or has made their anus numb somehow. They've even made up fake conditions like post Finasteride syndrome, which tell men that they shouldn't even attempt to save their hair, because if you get sides, the side effects will never go away, and your whole life will be ruined forever. And I have made several videos debunking this fake condition that is hyped up online, so I'll post two of them below in case you want to learn more about why post Finasteride syndrome or PFS is a fake condition invented by lawyers and Internet fearmongerers. As you guys know, hair loss is an extremely mentally debilitating condition, which has objectively made the lives of many men much worse. How vile can a person be to tell someone losing their hair that they have to suffer losing a critical part of their aesthetic identity, or suffer permanent side effects? Fortunately, what they're presenting is a completely false dichotomy. You don't need to choose between your hair and your health, because Finasteride is clinically proven to be safe and an effective treatment that works in over 90% of people, and it is the only treatment that has been proved to maintain its efficacy even after over 10 years of treatment. That is pretty remarkable in my opinion, and I have a video where I discuss that, which I'll link below in case you want to learn more about why Finasteride is not just great in the short term, but also in the long term as well. So, anyways, some people may wonder how is it that people can be so cruel and selfish as to scare men away from taking Finasteride and saving their hair? Well, like I said earlier, misery loves company, and the more miserable bald people there are out there, the more their own miserable experience feels validated, and I'm talking about people who are bald. These bald acceptance groups and channels you see all over YouTube and social media that talk about how liberating and wonderful going bald is, is just blue pilling to the extreme. If going bald really were not a bad thing, then these people wouldn't need to talk about it. They just go bald and get on with their days, and if they really liked it, why would they even bother shaving it? Why not just grow out that horseshoe and rock it, Hayachi Mishima style? That I could actually respect. But could there be another agenda behind all this Finasteride fear mongering? Maybe one that involves some monetary benefit, maybe through a lawsuit or two against the manufacturers of Finasteride? Well, as you can probably imagine, it might be difficult to prove to a court that Finasteride turned you into a gay woman. So, the new strategy for Finasteride haters is to claim that Finasteride shrunk their penis. So now they're going to have to convince a judge and a jury whether Finasteride made their prick small or if their peckers were already small to begin with. So, I looked very hard, no pun intended for a human study, which could verify one way or the other if Finasteride can shrink your John Thomas, and I couldn't find anything other than some anecdotal claims on the forums and some attempted lawsuits, but nothing scientific. What I did find though, were a couple of rat studies, and these are the studies that the sup the supposed shrunk and penis victims like to quote frequently. So, come join me my friends and let's talk about rat cocks today. So, there have been a couple of rat studies looking at 5AR blockers and rat genitals. So, let's take a look at the most recent study I can find, which is from 2018 titled, quote, the corpus cavernosum after treatment with Dutasteride or Finasteride, a histomorphometric study in a benign prostatic hyperplasia rodent model, unquote. So, just to dissect the title a little bit, the corpus cavernosum is a part inside of the penis. And histomorphometric just means that they looked at cells under a microscope in order to view any kind of changes as a result of usage from Finasteride or Dutasteride. And also, since a lot of men use these drugs not just for hair loss, but also for benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH, they wanted to also see what happens with these drugs when they're used in both normal rats, as well as rats with BPH. So, bottom line is that we're just trying to find out if in men or rats with BPH, if these drugs not just only shrink the prostate, but they also shrink the willies as well. So, for their methods, the investigators used two strains of rats, and one was just normal everyday rats that you may be able to see from a pet store. And the other was a special breed of rats with high blood pressure and prostate changes similar to men with BPH. They used 30 rats of each type in the study, so that's 60 rats total. So, the rats were all four months old, which is close to adulthood by rat standards, and of the 30 normal and 30 BPH rats, 10 in each group just got a placebo. Ten got Finasteride and 10 got Dutasteride, and this is where studies like this become pretty unrealistic, because when applying the results to humans, and I should mention this is a pretty common problem with a lot of these Finasteride studies in animals, because the dose is used on these drugs is just absolutely astronomical. The dose of Dutasteride used here in this particular study was 0.5 milligrams per kilogram daily for 40 days. And Finasteride was used at 5 milligrams per kilogram daily for 40 days. These are spectacularly high doses for these drugs on these animals. The highest recommended dose of Finasteride in humans with BPH is 5 milligrams per day, as a Proscar tablet would give you, and the average human weight is 70 kilograms, which means that the dose per kilogram for humans is 0.07 milligrams per kilogram.
[11:22]So, these rats are receiving 70 times the normal human dose, and of course, people taking Finasteride for hair loss often get by with even less than 1 milligram per day. So, this means that this rat dose that we see here in the study is 350 times the normal hair loss dose in humans, and the same problem goes with Dutasteride, where the daily dose is often 0.5 milligrams per day for humans. If you translate these doses to average human day doses for for treating BPH, that's 35 milligrams per day of Dutasteride, and 350 milligrams per day of Finasteride. So, totally unrealistic numbers that would never apply to humans and human clinical trials. So, who knows what dose like that would do to neurosteroid levels, as well as estrogen levels? Because remember, some of the excess testosterone created by blocking the 5AR enzyme is converted by the aromatase enzyme into estrogen, and estrogen can shrink penises. And we know this because trans women sometimes report penile atrophy upon administering estrogen. Of course, the minuscule increase in estrogen from a standard dose of Finasteride would never be remotely close to cause remotely close enough to causing any kind of issues, but who knows what would happen if men were to suddenly start taking 70 times the standard dose? Maybe the story would be a little bit different then. Well, so despite this obvious major flaw in the study design, let's go ahead and look at the results. So, after the 40 days, the poor rats were in this experiment, their penises were quote, collected, and this is why I'm vegan, folks. Anyways, they then looked at their penises under the microscope, you know, something the PFS crowd is probably very familiar with, and they also looked at the prostates of the rats, since prostate size we know is affected by DHT. First off, they saw that the BPH rats really did have BPH, but but that both Dutasteride and Finasteride helped correct this. Also, all the BPH rats had high blood pressure, as was expected with this strain of rats. Well, unfortunately for the normal rats who did receive Dutasteride or Finasteride, they did have reductions in the cross-sectional area of their penises by about 40%, in fact. This did not happen, however, in the BPH rats, which is for reasons unknown. Here you see a normal rat on the top and a BPH rat on the bottom. From left to right, we see the control penises, the Dutasteride penises and the Finasteride penises. This doesn't bode well, but before you start panicking, look at the scale on the lower bottom right. Yes, that's right, a normal rat penis is only three or four millimeters across. Take a look at a ruler to realize just how small that is. So, with rat, with a rat penis, a change of just 1 millimeter will give you the kind of 40% change they're talking about. I mean, is this something we can extrapolate to humans? I mean, if your Percy were to shrink just 1 millimeter, would you even notice? Maybe it's just because people who hate Finasteride already have rodent dicks to begin with, so they can't even afford to lose a nanometer in size. So, the investigators then go into detail on various changes that they found, and these changes actually seem pretty random. For example, the smooth muscle, the smooth muscle, I should say, of the corpus cavernosum was 26% lower in normal rats on Dutasteride, but was not changed by Finasteride. Though in the BPH rats, both Dutasteride and Finasteride lowered the amount of smooth muscle by about 30%. The BPH rats had increased connective tissue in their penises compared to the normal rats, and maybe this is due to the high blood pressure, since we know that since these rats have high blood pressure, that can cause fibrosis. And the part of the penis known as the sinusoidal space was reduced in the BPH rats taking control, as well as taking Dutasteride, but was increased in the BPH rats taking Finasteride, yet for some reason, proponents of the Finasteride shrinking your dick conspiracy theory ignore this part of the study completely, probably because it doesn't fit with their narrative. So, when the same type of drug has opposite effects like this, it is very probable that the results are due to just chance, and are not a drug effect, and in any case, remember, we are talking about rats here who are on unfathomably large amounts of Finasteride that no human would ever use under any circumstances.
[16:24]They also speculate that DHT depletion from the drugs caused these penile changes. But like I said before, there could also be estrogen level changes, especially at such high doses to explain any of these changes. Sadly, the authors did not measure hormone levels in the study at all, so there is no way to pinpoint any endocrinological factor behind these changes. Finally, and fortunately, I should say, the authors do admit that it is a stretch to apply these results to humans. They say, quote, the results obtained in this model should not be directly translated to men, unquote. Yet this has not stopped the Finasteride haters at all from spamming the study and other rat studies on every single post and subreddit they can possibly find about Finasteride in hopes of coping with being too scared to use the drug themselves. So, since even the researchers say we can't deduce anything from this study as it applies to humans, what should we make of these types of rat studies in general? Well, like I said, the drug doses used are extremely high, possibly toxic even for humans, and again, this is a common problem with every study about Finasteride that uses rodents. A good example would be the studies that look at neurological sides and neurosteroids, and I have a video about that that I'll go ahead and link below, in case you haven't seen it yet. Also, remember that the rat penis is almost microscopic to begin with. And the results here are pretty inconsistent, which suggests that some of the effects noted are probably due to just chance. Like when you have a study where you see opposite effects from the same type of treatment, it can be very hard to pinpoint anything conclusive from the results. These type of results though, as flawed and inconsistent as they are, are still nevertheless perfect for the Finasteride fear mongers who want to cast these drugs in the worst possible light they can in order to cope. There is no doubt that Finasteride, for as wonderful as it is, still nevertheless has a small chance of side effects. I mean, after all, there is no drug with zero chance of adverse effects, but there is still no reason at all to claim these drugs cause irreversible structural changes or even any structural changes at all in the penis of human beings. Especially when their source of these claims is just this one weak rodent study that has very inconsistent and flawed results to begin with. So, penis size, it's an issue that many men are insecure about, obviously. It's even been shown that the majority of men who have normal sized penises still feel they're inadequate. So, it is especially despicable that Finasteride haters, in their desperation to make as many people as bald and sexless as they are, have decided to pray on this issue of insecurity from many men. You don't have to choose between your penis and your hair. All Finasteride will do is ensure that you have more opportunities to use your penis to begin with, which is much more than the Finasteride hate cult and all their vitriol could ever hope for. So, hopefully, this is the last time I ever have to talk about rodent penises ever again. I'll see you guys next time.
