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Beware of this hair-raising off-label use for a highly risky arthritis drug

Don’t go near this risky med for any reason, especially to grow hair!

Dear Reader,

This may be the most absurd — and dangerous — “off label” use of a risky drug ever.

Using a drug off-label means that even the extremely permissive FDA didn’t approve that medicine to treat something it’s being touted for behind closed doors.

And this “off-label” idea could be a dream come true for Pfizer. But it could just as easily be a nightmare for a lot of other folks.

Doctors are allowed to prescribe whatever drug they want for any condition, approved or not. And most often they find out about these novel uses from their drug reps, but in a hush, hush, wink and nod kind of way — as that’s a big no-no with the FDA.

But I’d just bet the Pfizer reps will be doing a lot of winking and nodding with this one!

I’m talking about the prospect that the super risky, super expensive arthritis drug Xeljanz could become one of the company’s hottest sellers. And that’s not because it can “cure” arthritis, or any other disease, for that matter.

It all has to do with growing hair. Yes, hair, as in the kind on your head.

The TV reports are saying that researchers may have uncovered the answer to one of the biggest “mysteries” in life — baldness. And that “thanks to a little arthritis pill,” a bald man now has a full head of hair.

Well, hold it right there (sound of brakes screeching)! Because that “little pill” is actually a highly dangerous med that came on the market already wearing a black box warning!

But that’s the part of the story you’re not hearing about on the news. So before you even have the slightest thought to ask your doctor about growing hair with Xeljanz, here is what you need to know.

————————————————————————————————————–

A pill dressed to kill

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It’s bad enough that this drug is, for the moment anyway, only being pitched to those with rheumatoid arthritis.

But now the “exciting” news is out that Xeljanz can cause hair growth. And the news reports are showing photos of a beautiful, shiny head of hair — all from that “little arthritis pill.”

But hair isn’t the only thing Xeljanz can produce.

It’s one of those new “biologic” drugs for RA, and it’s a horror show — complete with warnings about things like “serious infections” that can cause death, tuberculosis and “other opportunistic infections.” The label also warns about lymphomas and other cancers that have been reported in people taking the drug.

So, you can imagine that even many patients suffering from severe RA might not want to take those kinds of risks.

But the news reports don’t talk about that. Just about a man who once was bald, and now “his hair is thick and full.”

To hear those upbeat stories, it’s like the side effects magically went away.

Right now, the folks at Pfizer must be having a party. Because a “cure” for baldness is a gold brick if there ever was one.

Here’s the real story.

A dermatologist at Yale saw a big opportunity to make some headlines.

He was asked to see a patient who had psoriasis. The man also had “Alopecia Universalis.” That’s a medical condition where you lose all of your hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes.

He got the man’s insurance to cover the cost of the Xeljanz pills — which can come to several thousand dollars a month — to treat the psoriasis.

It didn’t work very well for that. But it did seem to cause the man to grow hair.

By the end of 8 months, the 25-year-old patient had a full head of hair. And he’s still taking this dangerous drug every single day to keep it.

The man’s condition, alopecia, is thought to be a type of autoimmune disease in which your immune system attacks your hair follicles. That could be why he had all that hair growth from taking the drug.

And the Yale doc is already spinning the wheels on the thought that this med might be used for the more common cause of hair loss, male pattern baldness.

While claiming he didn’t want to “promote” it for that, he still liked to “imagine” that this drug “might work” as the hair restorer so many people are looking for. He called it an “enormous step forward” for treating hair loss.

But it’s more like a gigantic leap.

Because what causes baldness and what causes alopecia are not even in the same ballpark.
And I don’t think anyone would call the idea of trading even the thickest and fullest head of hair for the very real possibilities of dying from an infection, cancer or tuberculosis a “step forward” they would want to take.

Sources:
“Can this arthritis drug cure baldness?” Erin Cunningham, June 20, 2014, The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com

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