BPH - Why should my dad take Avodart or Proscar?!
Question:
BPH - Why should my dad take Avodart or Proscar?
The side-effects seems similar, why should he select one over the other?
Answers:
I've only had a brief look, but what you want to do, is see how effective the two drugs are and take into account the cost of both. In my brief look, the two drugs are different in that one drug inhibits 2 forms of an enzyme while the other inhibits one.
Drug compaines and researchers (even Government agencies), do trials for drugs to see how effective they are. These trials are quite revealing, and different drugs perform differently, even among different populations. Of these drugs, it could appear that one is more effective than the other in perhaps Asians, whereas the opposite could be true for white people.
In this case, it is worth doing a search for trials, to work out which of the two is the most beneficial (i.e. is likely to be more effective, less likely to have side effects). Very loosely, this is a form of evidence based medicine.
A good place for these trials is the Cochrane Library, which is online and is an amazing resource for clinical trials.