I think you need to keep reading. Finasteride blocks the enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT, which initially raises your testosterone levels. Your body reacts to this by secreting less luteinizing hormone, which results in less testosterone production, and your test levels return pre-finasteride levels. This is the suppression of natural testosterone production, and is exactly the same reaction you’d get from directly taking exogenous testosterone. If you ever come off finasteride, your test levels will immediately drop, and may or may not ever return to normal. If you’ve been taking finasteride for a very long time, it would be unlikely for your testosterone levels to ever return to what they were pre-finasteride.
I didn't edit my comment if that's what you're saying...
Taking moderate doses of steroids is also massively beneficial in many ways, with the worst of the side effects typically occurring if you stop taking them. But a lifelong dependency on a drug with a long list of adverse side effects is not a good thing, especially when ceasing treatment has its own long list of potential side effects.
Finasteride does suppress your natural testosterone production. If you intend to take it every day for the rest of your life, and are happy to gamble that you don’t get any of the other side effects, then maybe you’re happy taking that risk. But this is clearly not an ideal treatment, and I suspect most people who are prescribed it aren’t properly informed about these risks.
I fully agree with the risk factor, I was even on it for some time and discontinued the use because of the risks involved. But the risks were (to my limited understanding) less associated with testosterone, but rather the decrease in dht. And the potential effect that it has on your sexual life
Yes, you're right about that. I'm just trying to note that there is no guarantee that ceasing treatment would reverse those side effects (if you happened to have them), or that it wouldn't create other also-bad side effects.
Hormone treatments are very scary, and I think people are far too casual about them. You usually take a hormone treatment to affect one thing that the hormone does, but it probably also does 100 other things that you might not want to interfere with, and those 100 other things probably also affect many other things downstream themselves. Your body probably also regulates production of that hormone in some way, so now you're also probably interfering with god knows what upstream from that hormone production. Some of these effects are well understood by medicine, but plenty of them aren't, and even for the ones that are, there's no way of predicting how you're going to react personally. They're a very blunt tool in that respect, and I think most people who take finasteride, or TRT, or birth control, or beta blockers, or even things like topical steroids aren't helped much to properly understand how they work, and all the ways the treatments can go wrong, including the ways that they can form dependencies on the treatment.
