[mady]

Mady,

Like so many things, YMMV, and I don't know the answer to your query. At the dose you are taking, it should shut you down completely. Permanence is I think only a risk, and probably takes longer than 4 months, but I suspect that recovery may be quite slow, even with the help of something like Butea Superba. You might try reducing your dose to,say, 100 or even 50mg. I'd also be inclined to give it a holiday right now to find out how fast and how fully you do get it back!

Obviously your routine is working fine for boob development , but I'm surprised you were previously taking so much SP. By the nature of the way it works, SP can only achieve a limited reduction in effective androgen levels, and I would have expected that to be achieved at a lower dose. PM itself contains significant amounts of beta-sitosterol which is said to work in a somewhat similar manner to SP - this is one reason why using SP with PM is controversial, on the basis that it duplicates a function already provided by the PM while risking reducing the overall effectiveness of the latter.

The way I've interpreted it was that pm will not really work or work as well
without a t blocker . Hence the combo with spirotone making a lot of headway

[AbiDrew85]

By the nature of the way it works, SP can only achieve a limited reduction in effective androgen levels, and I would have expected that to be achieved at a lower dose. PM itself contains significant amounts of beta-sitosterol which is said to work in a somewhat similar manner to SP - this is one reason why using SP with PM is controversial, on the basis that it duplicates a function already provided by the PM while risking reducing the overall effectiveness of the latter.

This is such a common misunderstanding of the way the two work... And actually SP does contain some beta-sitosterol as well, but MUCH less than PM... The MAIN action of SP is blocking the reduction of testosterone to DHT. The ONLY action of beta-sitosterol is being a receptor antagonist. Calling those "similar" is using an extremely loose definition of the word.

I have found that SP was more effective at higher doses, up to a point, that point being different for everyone and being based primarily on just how much DHT they were fighting.

SP, btw, contains absolutely no phyto-estrogens that bind strongly enough to compete with miroestrol... so... no, it won't reduce effectiveness of PM.

What you mainly risk from SP is gaining weight in places you don't want it. Or having more difficulty in losing it. I've decided to discontinue it for those reasons.

[mady]

Hi Abi and AnnabelP
Sorry for i think you may have misunderstood what i meant . I know that sp and pm work well together . What I was getting at was that I have a strong family history of balding and I was fighting strong dht .
I know that even on a high dose of pm that it's effectiveness is minimal when fighting high dht . Sp wasnt quite strong enough as a blocker for me , Hence starting spirotone and having a huge increase in growth . Since being on spirotone I've also had comments that my hair looks like its thicker and appearing to be less sparse .
So I apologise for the misunderstanding but as I said I know sp and pm work well together but in my case sp hasn't been strong enough to fight dht explaining the reason why even on a high dose of pm that its been slow going

[AnnieBL]

Mady,

Please excuse me using your thread to answer AbiDrew. At least the second paragraph below this is marginally on topic and I've been looking for the opportunity to get in the third!

I've not found that anything I have ever taken has done anything to preserve or improve my scalp hair, but then I lost most of it in the five years after I was 18, and not all that much more over the next 50 years. I never had all that much body hair, but much of what I had has now gone, my male parts are much shrunken, even my pubic hair seems to have retreated and thinned my beard growth is noticeably weaker (if I tried to grow a beard now I think it would be one of those feeble wispy affairs) and my eyebrows have become almost invisible

Abi

I knew that I was treading on dangerous ground when I made that last post, but you will note that I did qualify ‘similar’ with ‘somewhat’. Unlike last time when in a senior moment I mis-expanded ARI, which was an inexcusable oversight in view of my having earned my living writing and amending patent specifications, including specs for pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical delivery patents, this time I feel I should come to my own defense. There does seem to be some genuine question as to whether SP acts as a 5ARI, or as a receptor antagonist, or both. It seems to act significantly differently from pharmaceutical 5ARIs such as finasteride ot dutasteride, since unlike those it is reported not to interfere with PSA expression and not to achieve any prostate size reduction in BPH. Recent studies have also queried even its effectiveness in alleviating the symptoms of BPH. All this has caused me to have an on-again/off-again attitude over the value to me of SP, particularly if my body has very low testosterone levels. Beta-sitosterol, which while present in SP in is found there as you say only in very small quantities, is probably not responsible in any significant measure for the benefits of SP. But I definitely have found reports of beta-sitosterol being a 5ARI. In typical plant sterol supplements it is found in much larger quantities than in SP, and has been reported to achieve somewhat comparable effects to SP, as well as providing benefits in controlling blood lipid levels. I’m quite sure that your research has been much more thorough than mine, but I don’t think that my understanding of the situation was unreasonable. I used to be quite adept at rapidly scanning the literature on a subject so as to pick up enough information to persuade my clients that I understood what they were talking about, and so as to be able to ask the right questions or use the right conversational gambit to get them to tell me what I really needed to know rather than what they wanted to tell me: hence the importance of not making the type of mistake that you picked me up on.

Don't get me wrong, I really value your expertise (and you are probably more likely to be right than I am on the present issue), and I find you an inspiring personality. You recently called attention in another thread to the horrific mortality rate among TGs, but I think that you must be at less risk than many. That mortality surely also extends to many others in the LGBT spectrum who suffer from severe dysphoria due to their inability to live with or defend themselves from their social environment, or who get lost somewhere along their road to finding themselves, or feel compelled to indulge in unduly risky lifestyles. In my own experience, and during the time I believed that I was gay, I certainly took some horrible risks, and at one point got myself into a situation in which I only narrowly escaped being thrown out of my college. I think I was given another chance only because there had recently been a gay suicide there and those in authority didn’t want to risk another one. You on the other hand seem to have thrown off any dysphoria: you know with certainty what you are within and where you are going, and plainly have the tenacity to find your way through or around the physical obstacles and fend off at least verbal and written assaults along your way. Put in other words you have the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and caritas (charity, but modern usage of that word no longer conveys the right meaning) exemplified by your attitudes towards and unstinting help to your neighbours here, and what we can see of your religioous commitment). I have hope, which certainly helps keep me alive, but I fall short in faith and caritas. I hope that I haven’t offended or embarrassed you, but I know you will speak your mind if I have Please do, perhaps on one of my threads. because it is so often by mistakes that we learn. I find that gender discussion is a minefield that it is difficult to find one's way through unscathed, and every pointer helps.

My apologies again, Mady, for temporarily hijacking your thread.