Miniaturization?

I have gone to a number of doctors and asked, as you have advised, to map my scalp for Miniaturization. They do not know what I am talking about? What should I do? Are you the only one who does this? How important is it?

There are a series of hair metrics (measurements) that any good doctor must do for a proper analysis of your scalp. First, if the doctor waves his/her hand over your head and says that you have a fine hair density, run for the hills. Good metrics require scientific measurement and the science of densitometry as I have defined it in scientific publications (such as this article from 1993 which discusses densitometry) .

If you step back for a moment, you will see that if you do not know just how much hair you have and the value of each hair, then you do not know much about the way your hair (or lack thereof) will meet your needs as you replace it. Metaphorically, think about a house, where half of the house has been eaten by termites and you need to replace the wood that is not any good. Then you want to add a room on at the same time. It would be crazy to try to do this job without assessing just how much wood is rotten (miniaturized hairs), how much wood is available from the lumber yard (assuming that you have a limited amount of wood/hair from the donor area), and how much area you intend to build up from scratch (the balding area which needs to be restored). If you can not measure any of these factors, you can not determine your needs, which must be matched against supply. It is not very complicated when you know what you are doing.

It would be absurd for a doctor to tell you that measurements are not important in determining early balding (miniaturization). It would be as if he/she is saying that the pending termite damage is irrelevant, and to just wait until the house caves in. Crazy? If you do not know if your wood supply is in 2×2’s, or 4×4’s then you do not really know the value of the essential replacement resources you have. If you have miniaturized hairs in the donor area, then you might have a disease which will contradict a hair transplant, but without measurements you can not say. If the termites have invaded the wood supply (miniaturized hairs in the donor area which is a disease in men and a common finding in women with genetic hair loss), then you can not build a house (trusses and all) with 2×2 studs alone (damaged or otherwise inadequate in quantity), you need wood beams and 18 on center 4×4 studs to support a wall properly. Likewise, you can not put in single hairs or damaged hairs into the transplant to do what god’s follicular units are doing for you now like when you were young.

So, to conclude, a doctor adds very little value to your Master Plan to help you determine what you must do over time, when the doctor does not use measurements to determine:

1. what the status of your scalp is at the time he starts Propecia with regard to miniaturization and in predicting your final hair loss pattern
2. what you are losing
3. what you have for supply to replace what you are losing or lost

This is not about the doctor making money doing hair transplants to all balding men, but rather using a full arsenal of treatments available to you, determining the value of those treatments over time and using his/her skills to your overall benefit. You have must a real clinical scientist / caring physician on your team who puts your benefit and goals above all else.