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Gari / Bigpoppa
Hello all, my name is Gari and I am Bigpoppa on other forums. Long story short, I'm in my twenties, was a ranked college athlete, and life was good. Post finasteride, post ssri, and post accutane syndrome is becoming recognized in the medical world. Basically, people ingest these substances (and other anti-androgenics) and a minority come off of the substance and feel good for a short period, and then have life altering / full endocrine crash/ persistent side effects that never go away. The side effects are too many to list but mimic those of androgen deprivation. Full blown sexual symptoms, no sexual pleasure, loss of muscle mass, extreme anxiety and depression, brain fog, loss of relationships and careers, body numbness, inability to sweat, hypermobile joints, prostate issues, no exercise tolerance, insomnia, etc. This all happens to people who were completely healthy. These side effects are completely unresponsive to medical treatment, hormones, and other medications. Medical workers turned us away for a long time but now conclusive evidence is out that this is indeed a real syndrome. A quick google search will prove my point. Regardless, people on forums have tried almost everything to no real avail for decades. We are desperate.
In my opinion, there was an autoimmune reaction, which is altering the androgen receptor or it is to DHT itself. Regardless of what it is to, I believe it is autoimmunity.
I have started by low vitamin A diet and will be reporting back. Thank you all for the info I have gathered thus far from Grant and this forum. Special thanks to @orion for helping me out as well.
Welcome here, @gari ! I’m sorry you’ve suffered such horrible symptoms from that combination of medications. If you haven’t seen this video yet, it offers some suggestion of the timeframe that can be involved with this approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqbelhIdg1Q
Since you’re young, I hope you’ll get some relief quickly. 🤞 Best of luck with the diet!
Thank you for your reply. QUICK QUESTION: as I hit the 2 week mark, I am getting nausea. Is this a common detox symptom? Like if I open my mouth I could gag kinda thing? People have mixed reports. My diet has been beef/chicken and rice/potatoes
I had the same problem after the second week and it lasted for two months. Now I am nearing the end of the fourth month and this has gone (might come back?). It helped eating blueberries with a bit of sugar. Also licking a piece of ginger.
Quote from Gari Martin on March 22, 2020, 6:52 amThank you for your reply. QUICK QUESTION: as I hit the 2 week mark, I am getting nausea. Is this a common detox symptom? Like if I open my mouth I could gag kinda thing? People have mixed reports. My diet has been beef/chicken and rice/potatoes
I know you are just hoping to restart again, but I did not see this earlier so I thought I would ask if you can tolerate whole grains or legumes? There is some evidence consuming soluble fibre away from fats can help with the detoxification process because it grabs onto the bile (which contains fat soluble waste) for removal instead of recycling.
I had the nausea too, I had it in two sporadic times in the last month. I was salivating a lot over the sink with a sensation that I was about to vomit, then it went away.
Yep had this. I can tolerate whole grains and legumes
@gari Have not watched this yet, but thought this YouTube video might be of interest to you:
Michael’s Story: “My Significant Cognitive Recovery from Post Finasteride Syndrome” (A Preview)
In October 2015, Michael decided to pharmaceutically treat his male hair loss with finasteride. He’d heard some horror stories, but after years of feeling self conscious with slowly thinning hair, decided to try it - thinking he could “beat” the side effects.
His life was changed when he began developing cognitive symptoms of PFS (post finasteride syndrome). Brain fog, anhedonia, memory issues, and depersonalization became his new cognitive “normal”. He lost his sense of self and spent the next four years seeking to improve his mental health.
Now, after discovering the primal diet (inspired by Aajonus Vonderplanitz), butyrates, and a few other holistic lifestyle changes, he feels about 60% recovered. Michael never suffered from physical symptoms of PFS / severe PFS, but believes that improvement of health and well-being is possible.
Here, he shares some of the tips he learned along the journey of recovery. Stay tuned for Michael’s full-length interview, where he will discuss his recovery process in more detail.
About the whole grains/legumes, they contain a lot of thiamin (legumes + whole grains) and molybdenum (especially legumes), which are helpful to this process. Brazil nuts contain selenium, and sunflower seeds are high in vitamin E (in addition to having LOADS of thiamin), which are helpful nutrients as well.
Also, some of us are finding that nutritionist and biochemist Karen Hurd’s “bean protocol” helps our symptoms, because it ensures the vitamin A is being removed and not getting reabsorbed via bile recycling. It can make the detox WAY more intense and awful at first, though, so it is best to work up v e r y s l o w l y.
Basically, you eat between 1 tablespoon and 1/2 cup of legumes 3 times per day between meals (at least 1 hour away from eating anything else). You can put vinegar or honey or salt onto the beans if desired, just NO FATS or it will not be effective. If your insomnia is bad (or if you are in a really bad state with your hormones), Hurd suggests consuming 1 tablespoon of legumes every 20 minutes (even at night, just get up and take the legumes every 20 minutes until you fall asleep).
Sounds a bit wacky lol, but it has really helped me with several symptoms and I feel like it is making the detox “work better.”
Some people use Sun Fiber to get soluble fiber instead, because it is easier: https://sunfiber.com/research/
It seems like most people seem to get worse when they increase their legume consumption. This isn't a good thing, it shouldn't be viewed as some necesssary evil in order to detox. I'm skeptical of the idea of increasing soluble fibre being a good thing. A lot of soluble fibre is actually pectin, even in legumes. Legumes are pectin rich. As I've covered before some pectin in the diet is normal. Conservative amounts of fruit, vegetables and legumes are part of a healthy balanced diet. However more pectin than normal translates to more formaldehyde for the liver to deal with and in people with health problems this is bad news. Legumes are also very rich in a range of anti nutrients, they are very nutritious but I don't think it is wise to over consume them. Soluble fibre also feeds SIBO... This could actually explain some of the negative symptoms since many have SIBO.
As much as I want to detox VA as quickly as possible I've come to realize that trying to help speed up excretion of VA just makes things worse. Taking supportive supplemental nutrients tends to just increase detox symptoms. We want to consume a non restrictive diet without supplements that is gently supportive of detox and then be patient. Eating a low VA diet seems to stimulate the body to release VA and to release it in dumps, going really low seems to be counter productive (the effect is more pronounced the more toxic one is) so I think it makes sense to avoid going really low and to avoid taking anything that stimulates detox. We do not want to promote the release of VA into the bloodstream. This can help minimize detox symptoms even though they are unavoidable. VA needs to be depleted over a very long period of time.
@tim-2 I agree with lots you say. I’m not a fan of increasing symptoms as I think that symptoms equal damage & I’m keen to do the detox in a slow gentle way. However, many people are seeing improvements with soluble fibre. Also Karen Hurd has a large & long term body of work of improving symptoms with soluble fibre - I can’t ignore this. Also it makes sense that increasing the excretion of bile out of the body increases the excretion of vA. This is not the only way to get rid of vA as a substantial amount leaves in urine (I’ve recently been looking into this). I’ve taken the view that I’m adding soluble fibre in small amounts & not overdoing it. To start with I went ‘bean crazy’ & my anxiety & pulse tinnitus etc returned - for me these are sure signs that vA has gone up too high in the blood. So I’m going low & slow now.
Sunfiber is in fact used as a treatment for methane SIBO so I don’t think that it’s as simple as soluble fibre feeds SIBO. Methane SIBO is treated differently to hydrogen SIBO. I personally like Greg Nigh’s approach to SIBO as it seems logical (to do with body creating hydrogen sulphide to produce sulphate) but I think it’s a complex topic.
Dr Smith is a big fan of soluble fibre & sees it as totally necessary for the detox. He’s gone up to quite a high amount quite quickly but that’s his style & he likes to experiment on himself before suggesting others do things. I get the impression that he’s doing well on it.