Reader Wants to Note His Positive Propecia Experience
I have herd a lot of negative things about Propecia lately. Here is something positive for the readers. I have been on propecia for 5 years and have not had 1 side effect. Most importantly I have kept all my hair thanks to this wonderful drug.
Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you got the best case scenario all around. I wish you continued success in your hair loss battle.
Remember, for every one person that has any side effects at all, there are hundreds with no side effects. This is just an email from a reader that has had success.
I don’t see anything in this post that says to dismiss those stories, and there are plenty of posts on this site about side effects. No need to be so hypersensitive to anything positive said about the medication.
BaldingBlogAdmin –
Check your math. If there were hundreds of consumers for every one that experienced side effects, you are implying less than 1% of patients get side effects. You are exaggerating the safety of the drug because in reality there are MUCH fewer healthy patients for each one with side effects.
Oops. My math was off. You got me there. How about this?
“For every 2 or 3 persons that have any side effects at all, there are hundreds with no side effects.”
There’s also no way to know if you’re going to get into a car accident on your way to work tomorrow. Life has risks. If you don’t want to drive because you’re afraid, that’s your choice to make. But how much time do you spend posting on car forums, patting yourself on the back by dodging another bullet staying indoors and away from vehicle traffic?
Steven, I don’t mean to make light of your fear, but honestly doesn’t it get old just repeating yourself about something you have no first hand experience with?
Take the email for what it is: someone wrote in to say he had a good experience with the medication. He didn’t provide age or photos, but then again, many of the emails published on this site don’t provide full details.
He didn’t say to ignore anyone else’s claims, so I’m wondering what you’re seeing in that original email where he is being dismissive?
I think you’re reading into things. He said he has heard negative things, so here is his counterpoint. The negative things are untrue when it comes to his experience, but I’m still not seeing where he makes any statement relating to anyone else’s experience.
So to answer your questions: No and no.
I’m not Dr. Rassman, but why couldn’t both experiences be true for two different people? I’d prefer to not get into semantics, but if he hasn’t experienced a negative reaction, he probably does doubt some of the claims because he hasn’t experienced them for himself. I think anyone would be smart to have a degree of skepticism about claims made on the internet, but that’s not to say that he’s discounting the possibility of negative reactions altogether. At least not from what he wrote.
Does it really matter, though? He wrote in with a positive comment after reading (or hearing) about negative experiences. Nobody has said here that a negative reaction from the medication is improbable. It’s been printed in the medical literature and on the packaging itself. The question mark remains over whether a negative reaction is permanent, and the author doesn’t delve into what kind of negativity he’s read.
This feels like an exercise in deciphering hidden meanings to song lyrics. Maybe if I read the email backwards, it’ll say something different. But I prefer to just read the email straight up, rather than trying to dig so deep into what he “really” meant in the four sentences he sent to BaldingBlog.
Balding Blog Admin (Dr. Rassman?) –
Even the second time your math was grossly wrong. I appreciate that Tex made an effort to straighten the situation out. Many studies have shown the 2% figure is strictly underestimated as one would expect when a pharmaceutical company designs their own clinical trials. This figure only includes sexual side effects without the general figures. This would bring the level to something considerably higher than 20:1 but of course I cannot calculate this precisely. I merely wanted to point out that was off by 10 fold which is very significant.
As I said, I’m not Dr Rassman. I moderate the comments to keep the site as spam free as possible.
I’m not a doctor, nor a mathematician. I was going off of the 1-2% number from the clinical trials. I didn’t research every study since then before I made my comment. You got me there.
Didn’t a similar amount of participants in those trials that took the placebo experience the negative side effects, too? You can feel free to show how grossly wrong I am again. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.
I guess not everyone experience the side effects. The chance of any side effects is extremely low. It’s good to hear some positive experience from time to time.
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[Admin note: Added a 2 to the commenter’s name so it doesn’t seem like the other Jeremy posted this.]
It’s true, I believe the group on placebos experienced a higher rate of side effects.
Thank you for correcting your previous statement. I truly do appreciate it. A significant amount of men in the clinical trials did experience “side effects” while taking the placebo but it was considerably higher for the real drug. The 2% roughly comes from subtracting the placebo effect from the real effect.
Okay, so according to that, 3.8% – 2.1% = 1.7% of patients should expect one or more adverse experiences, not the 5% as I previously stated. So we would expect 1 in 60 users to have a side effect when starting, which would reduce to 0.3% (1 in 333) after 5 years.
So I ask again, why the mass hysteria?
That is the source of the 2% figure everybody quotes from the clinical trials. The p value is 0.04 meaning the difference between the drug and placebo is statistical significant and the drug is thought to cause side effects over the placebo.