I don’t have any opinions on finasteride, but I do recommend you check out the topical formulations that people are using here:
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What was the dosage amount?
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Gus
#168
I’m on 2.5mg BID of oral minoxidil for the past 8 months
If you already got your glands removed, there should be no more risk with finasteride developing gyno due to excess estrogen I believe.
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I am currently trying 5mg daily for a month or so, and it seems that my hair is getting thicker. However, I’ve noticed a significant difference in my body hair, which is becoming freakishly thicker and growing longer. I will probably stop taking it as I don’t want to start shaving my arms or shortening my brows.
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I what I have read most doctors recommended 5mg per day of minoxidil for hair growth for men. See
And that is what I have just started trying.
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Gus
#172
I do take 5mg daily but I split it up as 2.5mg twice daily. Is there data to suggest I should be taking 5mg once daily vs 2.5mg twice daily?
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Oh no, I thought you were only taking it once per day. I am sure you are probably doing fine.
I just looked up BID
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Check with the surgeon, if they removed all of the breast tissue. Not sure if they are as thorough as they are with cancer. Overweight/obese people convert testosterone to estrogen at higher level, and finasteride can raise your testosterone, at least initially.
Ask the surgeon, though. If they do all of male mastectomies, they have a lot more experience with risk factors.
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Twice daily minoxidil seems safer than 5mg at least.
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AnUser
#176
I think I have some hair loss, before very pronounced at one spot at one time, but my Zinc was low, got reversed after supplementation.
Does finasteride work for non-DHT causes of hair loss if that is the case?
Finasteride is strictly a 5ar type 2 inhibitor, not an unspecific growth stimulant like minoxidil or stemoxydine. If your hairloss is really from zinc deficiency, all you have to do is wait a few months for your hair to regrow. Stemoxydine can speed up that process.
It’s always best to check for miniaturization though. That is the telltale sign of DHT-induced hairloss.
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AnUser
#178
This is such a small dose, jesus christ. But it checks out.
I don’t even know how you make it.
I can split a 5 mg finasteride dose in half, then mix each half with creatine in a 28 capsule machine.
With 00 vegetarian capsules, mixing in a mortar and pestle with geometric dilution (finasteride tablet powder, then an equal amount of creatine, mix it, then an equal amount of creatine for finasteride+creatine, and so on, doubling each time).
That means each capsule has 2.5/28 = 0.09 mg finasteride, good enough.
I wonder if there could be made a case for microdosing other pharma products (especially if someone doesn’t find a reason to increase dose).
0.2 mg has better data for hair loss, though, can easily be fixed by using one 5 mg finasteride tablet for each 28 capsules (0.18 mg).
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Wouldn’t it be easier to take 1 mg of finasteride once a week, or even once every two weeks? Its biological half-life is a couple of weeks.
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I also have a capsule maker, but geometric dilution of small quantities of dry powder created from crushed tablets isn’t easy even with tracer dye and commercial fillers.
To control dosing more precisely, I just crush a few pills with a mortar and pestle, then dissolve in Costco Minoxidil.
I use a very weak dose because I don’t want any systemic DHT suppression.
Details are here, including a summary of DHT impacts for topical applications.
If you don’t want the minox, you can always buy the solvents separately or do as the article says and dilute an overpriced commercial topical fin product to get it to last forever (Hims, etc.). As a last resort, there’s MinoxidilMax, if you think he’s reliable. I’m not so sure.
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AnUser
#181
That could be the reason why my microdose previously with rosuvastatin didn’t work so well. Do you know what the failure rate is, or how to prevent it?
Why are you avoiding systemic DHT supression? Couldn’t that have healthspan benefits at least for prostate?
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If you’re already using topical finasteride might aswell add minoxidil.
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I’m far from an expert and if there were a compounding pharmacist on the forum, I would ask them, so the following should be fact checked and maybe someone will correct anything that’s wrong here. [End disclaimer]
What I’ve gathered by reading discussions on pharmacist forums is that our odds are best when we have a uniform consistency in the source powder (any coating material makes that a bit harder), and we need to use a capsule filler material that has good dry flow properties to avoid clumping. I purchased Firmafill from lfamachines dot com for this purpose, though you can make your own as well.
(Some will go as far as carefully scraping coatings off with a knife.)
Adding a dry tracer dye like carminic acid to the initial mixture (i.e. the first step in the geometric dilution) can help provide some confidence that the final mixture is more or less consistent. One assumes that the dye has been thoroughly mixed/crushed into the first, small batch of powder.
Commercial mixing is often done with an expensive tumbler device like a v-mixer, but the rest of us are probably forced to use a shaker approach of some sort, and we may have electrostatic issues to contend with. I suppose one could try to make a v-mixer, but I don’t have welding skills.
To really have confidence in the final product, I’d want to send some finished capsules out for testing, but that’s pretty expensive.
All this is to explain why my preference is to look up solubility properties on pubchem or elsewhere and dissolve powders in an appropriate, non-toxic solvent. Bodybuilders (who have experience “homebrewing”) will alternatively use a suspension method if they don’t like ingesting DMSO or PG, for example. I’d have to search for the favored suspension liquids/oils because I don’t remember, but mixing and suspending can work very well providing you remember to shake the bottle.
DHT: I’m simply afraid of potential side effects, have no interest in being less masculine, and my PSA is already fine. But I understand the soundness of the healthspan argument.
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“To control dosing more precisely, I just crush a few pills with a mortar and pestle, then dissolve in Costco Minoxidil.”
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Unless finasteride gives you a huge estrogen imbalance, I don’t see how finasteride could make you less manly. My beard is still becoming denser, I can get angry, my muscle growth is great and my virility is going strong. The only thing I’ve noticed is slightly less body hair but I was already very hairy as a teen so I don’t really care.
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