Game Over Post Finasteride Syndrome - How I Recovered Part 1 of 2 | BrongFogBoy
BrongFogBoy · 14:022023-02-20
Patient / community self-report
Mentions treatments or doses — not guidance
Summary (paraphrased)
BrongFogBoy, a decade-long propeciahelp forum member, recounts ten years on 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors (finasteride, then Proscar, then dutasteride/Avodart) ending in a severe crash after stopping: anhedonia, brain fog, depression, insomnia, and post-exertional malaise that cost him his job and relationship. His self-described recovery came from an extreme self-experiment — one gram of iodine daily for seven days (as a biofilm disruptor) followed by a self-administered fecal microbiota transplant from a healthy donor. He is explicit that this is his personal account, that it could be dangerous, and that he is not recommending it; he defines 'recovery' strictly as full return to pre-drug function rather than managed symptoms.
Key points by timestamp (paraphrased)
- 00:00:00Opens with a disclaimer: not a doctor, not medical advice — consult a physician.
- 00:00:12Defines 'recovery' strictly: a full return to the pre-finasteride state, rejecting looser forum usages (symptom control, temporary remission).
- 00:01:18Reports restored exercise tolerance, diet freedom, sexual function, and — his worst symptom — complete resolution of brain fog (the source of his username) and anhedonia ('like a zombie').
- 00:02:31Establishes credibility: 10+ years and hundreds of posts on propeciahelp under the same username, distinguishing himself from drive-by 'cure' claims.
- 00:03:31Drug history: finasteride from ~18 for ~7 years with subtle unnoticed effects ('frog in boiling water'), Proscar ~2 years, then Avodart (dutasteride) ~1 year with 'gigantic' side effects — ~10 straight years on 5-ARIs total.
- 00:04:55On stopping: a 3–6 day rush of energy/vitality, brief re-exposure confirming the drug link, then after ~2 weeks feeling better than he had in a decade — a complete crash: anhedonia, depression, no creativity, insomnia, feeling bad after workouts, horrible brain fog.
- 00:07:49Anti-nocebo argument: he fully believed stopping would restore him, so placebo expectation should have made him fine — the opposite happened.
- 00:09:06Recovery method: 1 gram/day of pure iodine for 7 days (~500x a typical supplement dose) followed by DIY fecal transplant; explicitly warns it could be dangerous and is not a recommendation.
- 00:10:07'Smoking gun' stool test: near-total absence of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, which his doctor called unprecedented; says ~95% of forum members who posted tests showed the same depletion.
- 00:11:12Medical-grade probiotics (VSL#3) did nothing — in his view probiotics will not fix PFS.
- 00:12:14First FMT worked for one day then failed; repeats and a second donor also failed — until he added iodine on the theory that biofilms/fungus were blocking colonization, after which the transplant held.
Timestamps come from auto-captions and can be off by about five seconds.
Why it’s in the corpus
Patient-reported PFS recovery via a gut-axis intervention (high-dose iodine + DIY fecal transplant), motivated by stool tests showing near-absent lactobacillus/bifidobacterium — a pattern the speaker says ~95% of forum testers shared. Directly feeds the corpus's gut-microbiome thread (cf. Giatti 2024 PFS-003, PSSD-011). N=1, uncontrolled, author-flagged as potentially dangerous; include with caveats, not as guidance.
Transcript
This release lists transcript files (mQAnwC6dTkE.srt, mQAnwC6dTkE.txt). They are not bundled with the site yet; drop them into corpus/transcripts/ to publish them.
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