Sunday Times jumps in with report on risks of runaway finasteride sales from online pharmacies
April 26, 2025
Dear Friends:
Nice to see yet another nation giving protectionist-happy America a lesson in protecting public health.
Last week, just as we were dotting our i’s on a story about the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s efforts to prevent men from falling prey to the notion that finasteride couldn’t possibly cause life-altering adverse reactions, up pops the British Broadcasting Corp. with an awareness dose of its own.
Unlawful angle emerging?
“Around 6.5 million men in the UK are currently affected by hair loss,” says Ashley John-Baptiste on the April 18 edition of Dr Xand’s Con or Cure. “But when a so-called cure brings about worse side effects than you could imagine, it doesn’t seem like such a cure after all.”
Along with co-host Xand van Tulleken, MD, the journalist spent six months investigating the incidence of PFS in Britain.
“In September of last year, a [freedom of information] request to the [UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency] revealed that 228 men got in touch with them about their adverse reactions to finasteride,” he notes. “The MHRA say these numbers do not directly equate to the number of people who might actually suffer adverse reactions, just those who reported.”
So Con or Cure—whose mission is to “shine a light on medical malpractice and criminal behavior to help you take your health into your own hands”—tracked down and interviewed 10 of those men who did report, two of whom volunteered to share their stories on camera.
“After three weeks of taking finasteride, I started experiencing genital numbness, I suffered from a rash that didn’t disappear. I also suffered from stomach issues. So I stopped taking it after about four weeks,” says Shaun from London.
His worsening symptoms soon led him to the brink of self-destruction. “I experienced something called the crash. All my limbs felt weak. I couldn’t formulate a sentence. My speech was slurring. I had terrible chronic fatigue, panic attacks; crazy suicidal thoughts and depression.”
Fifty miles south, in Brighton, Sam was beset by PFS after ingesting just one Propecia pill. “Within a matter of hours, my heart was racing very fast. I started to get quite a bit of pain in my testes and penis, and severe low mood and anxiety—and joint pain and stomach issues,” he tells the BBC series.
“Then, exactly at the 14-day mark, all of the symptoms I had experienced were magnified a hundredfold.”
Regulatory realignment
Exactly one year ago, the MHRA issued a Drug Safety Update alerting health care providers that finasteride patients risk developing psychiatric and/or sexual side effects that can persist post-treatment. The hallmark of that campaign is a forthcoming patient-alert card, which reads:
“This medication can cause side effects including depression. In some cases, it may lead to having thoughts of suicide.”
Janine Jolly, Head of Compliance and Risk at the MHRA, sat down with Con or Cure to discuss the rationale behind more aggressive awareness of this sometimes-fatal condition.
“The onus is on the prescriber to make sure that the patient is fully aware of the benefits and the risks. One of their additional mitigation measures that the MHRA has introduced is the patient-alert card [which] enables people taking finasteride to be aware upfront that there are potential side effects to the drug,” Jolly tells Dr. van Tulleken.
“What the alert card does is put those warnings on the outside of the package so you can absolutely see, at the point of access, what the potential side effects of the drug may be…and not rely just on the patient-information leaflet inside the box.”
All finasteride manufacturers in the UK are required to implement the patient-alert card by year-end, according to the MHRA.
Telemeds taking more heat
On April 18, the same day Con or Cure debuted its finasteride investigation, The Sunday Times published a story about a trend that’s causing anxiety among old-school Rx practitioners.
“Tens of thousands of men in their late teens, twenties and thirties are buying finasteride from online pharmacies, which have reported sales more than doubling in the past year,” Health Editor Eleanor Hayward writes in her 1,400-word report.
“However, finasteride has been linked to serious potential sexual and psychiatric side effects, and there are concerns men may not be being properly advised of the risks or undergoing checks.”
Hayward adds that “Superdrug Online Doctor said the number of new patients requesting finasteride is up 122 per cent in the first three months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024.”
In reaction to this boom, the UK’s largest professional association of pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), recently issued a warning that digital dispensers like Superdrug, Boots and Lloyd’s should inspect men’s hairlines before prescribing finasteride.
“What is absolutely essential is that any online consultations are just as thorough as a face-to-face consultation. That must include a full medical history, and checks to confirm the clinical need for the medicine,” Alwyn Fortune, Policy and Engagement Lead at the RPS, tells The Times.
Two months earlier, James Davies, RPS’s Director for England, sat down with another BBC show, BBC Breakfast—the UK’s most popular morning program, with 1.2 million daily viewers—to discuss what he hoped to achieve with the new directive:
“What’s really important is that patients are getting a complete consultation taking place. That might be the sharing of photos, or a video call, to make sure prescribers can check out the amount of baldness that’s taken place, and to really discuss and understand the issues related to the treatment.”
Back in the USA, much less headway
Unlike its British counterparts, the US Food and Drug Administration has never once, to our knowledge, granted a media interview to discuss the increasingly urgent subject of finasteride safety, let alone slap a red-box warning on the product, like France’s ANSM did in 2022, or even dispatch a Dear Health Care Provider Letter, like Germany’s BfArM did in 2018.
To be fair, however, the agency did issue a safety alert this week, warning consumers, health care providers and compounders that “There are potential serious risks associated with the use of compounded topical finasteride products.”
That, based on 32 cases involving symptoms common to PFS reported to the agency’s Adverse Event Reporting System between 2019 and 2024, including “erectile dysfunction, anxiety, suicidal ideation, brain fog, depression, fatigue, insomnia, decreased libido and testicular pain. Most of those cases involve side effects that “continued to persist after product discontinuation.”
Then again, this new alert marks only the second time in finasteride’s increasingly infamous 32-year history that the FDA has warned of adverse events. Its first safety alert came in 2011, and involved the increased risk of finasteride patients being diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer.
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.