Documentary featuring researchers Roberto Melcangi and Michael Irwig is based on interviews with 25 PFS patients
April 18, 2025
Dear Friends:
MAGA be damned, when it comes to PFS awareness, Canada is putting the USA to shame.
Last month, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) debuted an Enquête documentary—Betting on Hair, Gambling on Health (English version here)—examining the myriad risks of finasteride use, along with allegations that the medication’s originator, Merck & Co., “knew of these risks but chose to downplay them in order to maximize profits.”
Seeing as Enquête is French Canada’s highest-rated investigative newsmagazine series (think 60 Minutes north of the border), we were pleased with such heavy-hitting exposure, and never would have thought to press for more press.
Thankfully, the CBC network bosses saw things differently.
“Considering finasteride’s increasing popularity, we felt it was very much in the public interest to highlight the fact that, in a subset of users, the drug’s side effects can be severe, unrelenting and life-altering,” Brigitte Noël, the lead reporter on Betting on Hair, tells us.
So the CBC spread its scoop across all its news platforms, both English- and French-language—TV, radio and print. That combined entity, known as CBC/Radio-Canada, reaches more than 20 million people per month.
Core inquest
In all, Noël and her Enquête director, Judith Plamondon, spent six months investigating incidence of PFS in Canada, speaking to 25 patients who suffer from the condition, three of whom appear on camera in Betting on Hair.
“There wasn’t anything back then on the Internet about post-finasteride syndrome, about long-term side effects, about the severity of the side effects,” says Tom, who took Propecia 13 years ago. “I asked my doctor and he said, ‘You have nothing to worry about. If you have any side effects, which is very unlikely, it’ll stop as soon as you stop the medication.’”
More recently, Wei Wong tried topical finasteride, which is often touted as being safer than oral finasteride, despite scant scientific evidence to that effect.
“I discontinued the medication after 10 days. Immediately the next day… I was in pain. I could not think clearly. I did not have any motivation to do anything. I was in pure survival mode,” he says. “Anyone who spent even 10 seconds in my mind, in my body at the time, would say that that is hell on earth.”
Enquête also spoke with the mothers of two young men who committed suicide after developing PFS, though not before writing about the condition in an effort to warn others of finasteride’s potential dangers.
“Before he died, he said, ‘I wish it was cancer.’ That’s a terrible thing to say, I told him. ‘But you don’t understand. There’s compassion for cancer patients,’” recalls Denise Turner, whose son Marc Turner took his own life three years ago, at age 36. “He said, ‘No one believes. No one understands. There’s no compassion for PFS patients.’”
“I saw my son hit his head against the walls, desperate for his migraines to stop. I saw him writhe in pain from testicular and penile pain,” recalls Sylviane Millon-Mathieu, whose son Romain Mathieu took his own life in 2016, at age 25. “I’d wake up in the morning, around 6:30 or 7 a.m., and I’d find him lying on the living room floor. He hadn’t slept a wink.”
In the documentary, too, are the world’s two most prolific PFS researchers, Roberto Cosimo Melcangi, PhD, Head of the Neuroendocrinology Unit in the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Milano, and Michael S. Irwig, MD, of Harvard Medical School.
“There are thought leaders in the field of dermatology who’ve published a lot about hair loss. And it turns out that some…received money from Merck to give lectures or to do research,” says Dr. Irwig. “They’ve often failed to disclose these conflicts in their own publications, which have tried to minimize my research.”
A production of Ici Radio-Canada Télé, Betting on Hair is hosted by Marie-Maude Denis. The nation’s drug-regulatory authority, Health Canada, last year issued its fourth finasteride-safety warning since 2018, after linking 23 local suicides to PFS. (For a listing of all nations known to have issued PFS warnings, please consult our PFS Global Warning Map.)
Companion reports
Throughout the month of March, the entire CBC news division bolstered Enquête’s mission to expose questionable practices and reveal little-known or hidden facts on distressing issues of public interest.
• March 6: In tandem with Betting on Hair’s debut, Ici-Radio Canada News published a 5,000-word investigation by Noël and Plamondon. Headlined Finasteride: Beautiful Hair, but at What Price? (English translation here), the report begins, “Finasteride…is a drug taken by millions of men who want to slow down their hair loss. But it can be dangerous: Over the past decade, regulators have added a host of new warnings about risks of sexual dysfunction and suicidal thoughts, side effects that may persist over time… Has Merck…been transparent about all the risks of its product? Disturbing revelations are piling up for the pharmaceutical company.”
• March 17: CBC News published a 2,000-word report headlined Hair-Loss Drug Finasteride Can Cause Debilitating Side-effects, Men Say, which included a five-minute TV-news package featuring additional comments from Turner about her son’s suicide. Among the report’s revelations are that “Merck invested heavily in the stigmatization of baldness through mainstream ad campaigns, but also through more covert means. In the early 2000s, several news articles were published about the distress caused by hair loss in men. These stories all bore similar hallmarks: a hair research institute presenting the results of surveys showing that bald men had fewer job opportunities and less luck in love than their well-coiffed counterparts… However, our reporters found that this research institute, the surveys and dermatologists all received funds from the pharmaceutical company.”
• March 22: CBC Info published a 2,200-word investigation, by Noël and Daniel Blanchette Pelletier, into ever easier digital access to finasteride. Headlined The Wild West of Men’s ‘Health’ Websites (English translation here), it begins: “In Canada, the number of prescriptions for finasteride…has increased by 50% in the last decade. This surge in popularity is partly driven by the proliferation of online pharmacies and telemedicine sites claiming to be dedicated to men’s health. But while these sites, some of which are outright illegal, flood the web with ads touting the benefits of these products, our investigation reveals that they are discreet about the rare but devastating side effects they can cause.”
• March 25: CBC Listen debuted an episode of The Current, headlined The Rare but Life-Altering Side Effects of Hair-Loss Drug Finasteride. During her 23-minute interview with host Mark Kelley, Noël expounds on the reporting laid out in Betting on Hair. “On the label for Propecia, it says the incidence of each sexual side effect decreased to less or about 0.3% by the fifth year of treatment,” she says. “What we discovered in…court documents [that] an American journalist from Reuters got access to in 2019 are internal emails from Merck, exchanged by their employees, that cast doubt on that 0.3% figure… [The] employees say that this statistic is ‘misleading.’ They say that, to get such a low number, Merck only accounted for the men that were still taking the drug in the fifth and final year of clinical trials. So…the men who in the years previous had perhaps left the trials because of sexual or other side effects, they were not included in that final tally.”
Back to you, USA…
While penning this story, we received an email from our friend Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal letting us know that a companion podcast to his recent finasteride investigation, They Wanted a Quick Fix for Hair Loss. Instead, These Young Men Got Sick, had just dropped on Spotify.
So we feel it’s only fair to note that, MAGA notwithstanding, the American and Canadian media are indeed united, if only in their efforts to warn citizens that finasteride can be devastating to an undetermined percentage of the patient population.
Hosted by Kate Linebaugh, The Journal podcast, A Quick Fix for Hair Loss Is Making Some Men Sick, focuses on an adversiting loophole that’s being exploited by telehealth companies so to maximize sales.
“There are a lot of men we spoke to who got some very gnarly side effects from finasteride that they got from telehealth companies, and they said they really weren’t warned about the side effects,” says Winkler, whose investigation was based on interviews with 17 finasteride users who were prescribed the medication by digital vendors like Hims and Keeps.
“When you watch a commercial for a drug on the evening news or something, a narrator says a whole bunch of things very quickly and a whole bunch of small print goes past you on the screen. And you’re supposed to know, before you go and ask your doctor about this medication, that there are some risks,” continues Winkler.
“Moreover, your doctor is trained to tell you about those risks so you can make an informed decision whether this medication is right for you. So what’s interesting about telehealth companies? They’re not required in their ads to disclose side effects, so they typically don’t.”
FUBAR-Tube
On the podcast as well is Mark Millich, 31, a former US Army sergeant who now works as a construction health-and-safety manager—and host of the Moral Medicine YouTube channel—in our nation’s capital. Five years ago, without ever speaking to a doctor, he was prescribed oral finasteride by Hims.
Six months later, he developed a boatload of debilitating adverse reactions.
“It felt like I’d been lobotomized. I’d developed, at the time, permanent slurred speech, anhedonia, couldn’t feel any emotions, felt very foggy. It was like the worst hangover in my life. I also developed severe muscle twitching…all over my body,” Millich tells The Journal.
Fifteen months after that, he quit. But his health woes didn’t.
“It was like a complete nuking of my endocrine system,” he says. “I lost 20 pounds. I developed loose skin… I developed lipoatrophy on my face. My voice became higher pitched. My cognitive impairment continued to get worse. I developed joint issues. It was difficult to walk… My muscles became squishy… My beard started to fall out.”
Now, more than two years into his struggle with PFS, Millich sums up his feelings about finasteride to The Journal pretty much the same way all 3,300+ patients in our database have summed theirs up to us:
“If you’d told me I’d be dealing with one-tenth of what I’m dealing with, I never, ever would have taken that medication.”
Finasteride was originally developed by Merck & Co., Inc., and first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1993 as Proscar (5 mg, for enlarged prostate), and again in 1997, as Propecia (1 mg, for hair loss).
In June 2021, Merck spun off its Organon subsidiary as an independent public company (NYSE: OGN). Founded in the Netherlands in 1923, Organon bills itself as a “global health care company dedicated to making a world of difference for women, their families and the communities they care for.”
Among the Merck products Organon acquired in the deal were Proscar and Propecia. To report adverse events for either finasteride product, call the Organon Service Center at (844)674-3200, or email Service_Center@Organon.com.
Anyone living in the US who suffers from PFS should also report his or her symptoms to the US FDA. Anyone living outside the US who suffers from PFS should report his or her symptoms to the US FDA as well as to his or her local DRA, as directed on our Report Your Side Effects page.
If you or a loved one are suffering from PFS, and feeling depressed or unstable, please don’t hesitate to contact the PFS Foundation as soon as possible via our Patient Support hotline: social@pfsfoundation.org
Thank you.