Who writes this, and what it is not

Reductase Review is a small independent site about one family of medicines: finasteride, dutasteride, and the topical versions that have grown up around them. It exists because the published record on this subject is better than almost anything written about it, and much harder to find.

Not reviewed by a clinician, and not pretending to be

Nobody medical has read this site. No doctor is named on it, no dermatologist has checked a page, and no reviewer appears in its structured data — a detail worth stating because it is trivially easy to fake and widely faked in this niche. If you see a hair-loss page with a doctor's photograph and a review date, ask yourself what that review consisted of and what evidence of it you have.

The writer here is not a clinician and cannot examine anyone. What this site can do is read a drug label properly, find the regulator bulletin behind a headline, and keep the date attached to every claim. That is the entire offer.

What it is built from

Primary documents, opened at their own publishers rather than quoted from summaries: the FDA-approved labelling on DailyMed, Drug Safety Updates from the UK's MHRA on gov.uk, the European Medicines Agency's referral pages, New Zealand's Medsafe Prescriber Update, and a review report from Japan's Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency. Every one of them was read on 24 September 2026 for the pages published here, and the site's FACTS file lists each source with its address.

Where those documents disagree with each other, or with the confident version of events circulating online, the disagreement is written out rather than smoothed over. That is the most useful thing a site like this can do.

The standing rules

• No doses. Not in prose, not in a table, not quoted from a label as though the label were addressed to the reader.
• No before-and-after photographs, ours or anyone's. They are the least reliable evidence in this field.
• No invented patients, no testimonials, no "we tested it", no star ratings from users who do not exist.
• No score out of ten for a medicine. Grading a prescription drug like a gadget would imply a recommendation this site is not qualified to make.
• No clinic, surgeon or pharmacy recommendations, and no links that sell a medicine.

Mistakes

This site will get things wrong. When it does, the correction goes on the page itself, dated, rather than being quietly edited out — and the fastest way to make that happen is to write to the desk with the document that shows it. Corrections about primary sources go to the front of the queue.

How the site is funded, and what it refuses to take money for, is set out in full on money and refusals.