If you follow my stuff you may recall that not that long ago I ear-marked a bunch of money to go down to Saigon to get hair transplant surgery only to discover once I arrived that I have high blood pressure and was ineligible for the surgery. This is because in order to do the many hours procedure, you have to be awake for it but also need to get about a dozen Novocain shots so that the thousands of tiny drilling procedures and replanting process doesn't make you jump all over the table while they are doing it. As it turns out, getting this much local anesthetic can kill you if you have blood pressure issues. So while this was disappointing to me at the time - I actually got quite upset with them and they ended up refunding my hotel and flights - I was happy to be made aware of my high-blood pressure issues so that I could do something about that.
They told me to come back once I got my blood pressure under control and honestly, I had intended to do so. In the meantime though, they offered me some sort of pharmaceutical options that could help my hair to not get any worse while we waited.
the top of my own head, way back when
When I first started taking all of this stuff, I didn't have much faith that it was going to accomplish anything but when faced with how little it cost, I figured it couldn't hurt so I went forward with it anyway. The products that I got my hands on were as follows
- Topical minoxidil liquid that you are meant to apply 2 times per day, to the affected area
- A minoxidil tablet that is meant to work from the inside out
- A product I had never heard of called Dutasteride that also does "something" inside your bloodstream
- A special type of shampoo that I honestly don't believe in at all because the active ingredient is garlic
Since at the time that I started taking all this stuff I really DID intend to return to the clinic, I was rather fastidious with how I applied all of these things and if there ever was a day that I couldn't remember if I took the pills or not, I would double up rather than skip a day. I don't know if this makes any difference or not but I'm pretty sure you can't OD on hair pills so what harm could be done by getting a little extra every couple of weeks?
I abandoned the topical minoxidil before the first bottle was even finished because it was complicated to apply and you were meant to let the product evaporate completely before touching your head or doing anything else. This is rather difficult to pull off in a country where it is routinely a million degrees outside and you are a person that is very prone to sweating. So that went away after about a month. I still kept doing the other 3 things though although I don't use the garlic shampoo every time I shower because it cost a fortune and I can find no scientific evidence online that such a product does anything at all. It seems like a scam to me.
The thing that I did stick with though, was the two tablets that I was told I would see results with
If you look online about the efficacy of these two products, there are decades of research that have been done in a scientific way. I mean that the studies were not funded by the people that manufacture the products. In one study that was done over the course of 10 years in Japan, the subjects experienced a near 90% hair retention rate and strengthened growth.
Let me explain to you what I mean by that: There is currently no method of "regrowing" dead hair follicles. If a follicle completely dies, that's it, game over man! game over! However, if you have hair loss the likes of which I had in the first picture, chances are that your hair follicles are still alive and kicking, they are just on their last legs. I was privy to seeing my hair follicles using some sort of machine that they had at the clinic in Saigon and I was kind of surprised to see how many hair follicles I did have in the affected area, they were just really weak and were sprouting very thin and mostly clear hairs that according to the technician in attendance, almost always fall out before they grow to any real length. They are so weak that they can't really stick around for very long and this is why a lot of people, primarily men, end up with a bald spot on their crown before the rest of it goes.
That is the same guy that is in the first photo and you can see that my crown, without any sort of strange combover, has appeared to fill itself back in. It also lets me know that I should probably get a haircut.
Now I don't know how it will work in your country but here in Vietnam getting a hold of both of these products (forget the topical two, nobody is going to stick to that procedure) was a very easy process. For a three month supply which you take daily, the cost is 1.3 million VND or around $40. I have been taking this for nearly 9 months and have seen great results. When you consider that the hair transplant that I was going to do was going to cost me $5000, then $120 a year isn't that bad of a deal even though I would imagine this is something you have to take forever.
Here's something else to consider if you are someone that is considering a hair transplant. Just because you move your hairs to a new place on your scalp, this doesn't mean that your male-pattern baldness is going to just switch off. You very well could end up with a "hair island" where the indestructible hairs were replanted, only for them to be surrounded with hairs that continue to die all around them.
src
I don't know this person but it is a good example. He got a crown transplant too early and ended up with exactly what I am describing and to me, this looks more silly than if he had just allowed the hair to go away.
The tablets that I am taking now are meant to, and have been proven by many studies to stop hair loss in its tracks. Meaning, you will keep the hair that you currently have provided you are not one of the 10% of people that don't respond to it. Just so that you don't think I am creating these stats for some sort of bizarre personal gain here is one of the long-term studies that I am referring to. There are many more. Basically, almost everyone that takes a combination of minoxidil and Dutasteride are going to keep the hair they currently have. You can always STILL do the transplant as well if you are really vain and if I get a good pay-year I may end up doing it as well anyway because the receding hairline at the front of my head is comprised of almost entirely fully-dead hair follicles and like I said before, there is nothing that can be done about this with the medicine that currently exists anywhere in the world.
When a study goes over 10 years I think we can look at it and say that it is "long enough" to have faith in it.
Now for my American friends out there I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Dutasteride is not FDA approved in your country because of rather shady reasons. The same company that manufactures Finesteride, which is essentially the same thing as Dutasteride, is almost certainly the reason behind why it is NOT FDA approved and therefore, you can't get it. The patent hasn't yet run out on Finesteride and if they were to push the superior product Dutasteride onto the market, they would only be cannibalizing their own profits. So you'll probably get access to the better product, conveniently, right around the time the patent is about to expire on the product that has been on the market for years (funny how that works huh?) In the meantime, most of the rest of the world is able to get all of these products and depending on where you live, you likely wont even need a prescription. Minoxidil has been OTC for a long time and at least here in Vietnam, you don't really need a prescription for anything anyway.
This article was written with one particular person in mind, but there are probably a lot of other men out there that would like to have this information as well. Keep in mind that you probably wont notice any change at all until at least 3 months of taking the product. At the moment we have a "test crowd" here in this very city of 5 men and we are all monitoring to see if progress is made with all of them the same as it appears to have worked for me.
There is hope! Don't give up hope!