Why avoid baldness and BPH drugs....

Today's Post: Friday, 6-10-2011

1. Those drugs for hair loss and BPH, benign prostate enlargement, that work by reducing testosterone levels have always been drugs that have more side effects than desired effects.

Testosterone improves mood and improves concentration. Testosterone is a growth hormone that helps you keep your muscles or build more if you exercise and helps keep your bones strong. And, that’s IN ADDITION to helping you want and enjoy sex that is testosterone’s best known effect.

There is even some information that low testosterone can contribute to heart disease. That means that testosterone helps prevent heart disease if you have a normal amount.

So, drugs to reverse testosterone and lower its levels reverse these benefits.

To me that means drugs for hair loss and BPH, benign prostate enlargement, that work by reducing testosterone levels started out being truly BAD drugs.

And, it turns out they are far worse than that!

They also increase your risk of dying from aggressive prostate cancer. Oops!

*(See the news a bit later in this post.)

(We also did a post recently, on Thursday, 5-19 this year, 2011, on ways to prevent aggressive prostate cancer. Clearly avoiding these drugs belongs on that list!)

2. If you are balder than you’d like, there are several alternatives to these drugs that work. You can build the rest of you and your self-esteem enough that baldness becomes a minor issue. You can wear a stylish hat as Dallas coach Tom Landry once did. Or, if you are truly determined not to be bald, you can literally have hair implants much like re-seeding a lawn.

And, urine flow reductions that are onerous or medically harmful from BPH can be corrected with surgery or laser surgery.

There are also a number of supplements that can turn off the process that causes BPH or which increase urine flow.

Saw Palmetto has a good track record of improving or keeping good urine flow. So does the sterol supplement beta sitosterol. (Since saw palmetto also has sterols and sterols are a safe and effective way to lower LDL cholesterol, I have been taking both of those for quite some time. I did some other things too; but in dropping my LDL from 130 to 73, these two supplements did part of the job.)

In addition, testosterone does NOT directly cause your prostate to grow to too large a size. If and only if it is converted into a substance called DHT is it problematic. DHT does cause your prostate to grow to too large a size.

But if instead of lowering testosterone, you prevent it from being converted to DHT, you prevent or stop the prostate growth.

Several supplements exist that prevent or reduce this conversion. They include bee pollen, nettle root, and pumpkin seeds.

Since saw palmetto, beta sitosterol, and pygeum improve urinary flow and pygeum reduces extra nighttime trips to the bathroom, they may also have this effect.

3. *Here’s the two headlines I saw in the news:

a) “Prostate drugs raise risk of prostate cancer: FDA Thurs, 6-9-2011 WASHINGTON (Reuters)

A class of drugs meant to improve symptoms of an enlarged prostate gland actually increase the chance of getting a more serious form of prostate cancer, health officials said on Thursday.”

b) “Drugs for Enlarged Prostate May Raise Risk of Aggressive Cancer THURSDAY, June 9, 2011 (HealthDay News)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is calling for new warning labels on a class of drugs used primarily to treat enlarged prostates, because the medications may raise the risk of developing an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

In a statement released Thursday, the agency said the drugs involved include popular medications sold under the brand names Proscar and Propecia (sold by Merck & Co.) and Avodart and Jalyn (sold by GlaxoSmithKline).”

Millions of men have taken these drugs according these news articles.

With their already known side effects, hopefully this news will make them as unpopular and unused as they already deserved to be.