The Pharmaceutical Feminization of Males
More men are saying that a popular anti-balding drug is compromising their physical, sexual, and psychological health.
Finasteride is one of the most common treatments for the full spectrum of male pattern hair loss. You might have heard of Hims, a popular telehealth company that offers it in oral and topical forms as a subscription.
Hasan Piker, a left-leaning streamer with millions of followers, praised finasteride as “the only FDA-approved anti-balding medication,” and said that he has used it to that end.
Now, a growing number of men are taking to social media to talk about how they’ve “feminized” since they started using the medication, with side effects from long-term sexual impotence to gynecomastia and a variety of mental health issues.
These claims are not new. Merck, the company that brought finasteride to market as an anti-balding drug under the brand name Propecia, has been sued more than once over the years for misleading labels and shady business practices that have left consumers suffering the consequences. What makes things different now is that, despite serious concerns about long-term side effects, finasteride has been heavily hailed by male social media influencers as a kind of wonder drug in the age of “looksmaxxing” and Gigachad memes. Last summer, NBC News reported that finasteride prescriptions had exploded by nearly 200 percent in seven years, in large part due to young men immersed in the digital soup of being very online.
“It’s like water in my clinic,” said Dr. Jerry Shapiro, a dermatologist at NYU Langone Health. “I’m prescribing it all the time.”
For influencers like Piker, appearances are an essential part of the bit. But they aren’t really being open enough about the risks involved even as more men report experiencing post-finasteride syndrome, or PFS, the collective name for a range of adverse reactions. Most medical bodies don’t even recognize PFS as a distinct medical phenomenon yet. The Post-Finasteride Syndrome Foundation states: “As an increasing number of men report their persistent side effects to health and regulatory agencies worldwide, medical and scientific communities are only beginning to realize the scope of the problem.”
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