Shaving your head will not change anything about your balding problem. The truth hurts!
Most of the stem cell treatment being offered are scams. A few doctors have built a reputation for delivering stem cell treatments and have made a fortune on men chasing the impossible. There are no stem cell treatment that are known to work.
I no longer get morning wood and my erections are only about 70% what they were before fin. Been telling myself it’s all in my head, it’ll resolve itself in time, and even that it’s probably caused by other meds I’m on (SSRIs). Well it’s been around 9 months now and there’s been no improvement and I’m no longer on SSRIs. So what now? Should I go to my doctor and ask for a hormone panel, or just stop fin immediately? I’m only 21 and it feels like my choice is between having no hair or no sex life.
If I stop fin for a few months to see if my erections come back, will I likely lose a significant amount of hair? Would jumping back on fin after a few months recover most of that lost hair?
Really unsure what to do, so any advice from people who’ve been in similar situations would be really appreciated
You might want to cut it out for 3 weeks as I advise my patients, then restart it as one pill every 4 days and try that for a week. IF that works, then increase it to one pill every three days for 3 weeks and if that work then try 1 pill every other day and stop there. IF the ED comes back, then you either have found the dose you can tolerate, or may not find any dose that works. Best, of course, to discuss this with your doctor.
Here are some considerations I’ve had before jumping into the HT route and wanted to share these with the community to get feedback and possibly provide some additional options for those in a similar position:
Background on me: 29M diffuse thinning throughout top of head. Finasteride/Minox for the last ~6 years that has slowed, but not stopped hair loss. When I first began noticing hair loss, I always considered a HT a possibility, but now my hair has progressed to where I think it may be appropriate to start considering it as an real option.
Everything you’ll read on the hairloss forums essentially boils down to the fact that getting a HT is a one way street. In almost all cases (especially if you are young) you will need a total of 2-4 surgeries. You will need to be financially and mentally ready for that. Even after that, you may not get the results you were really targeting.
The biggest hang-up for me, and undoubtedly for some of you, is that there’s not really any going back from the HT route. Regardless of if you go FUE or FUT, there will be scarring. If you get an unsatisfactory result, you will not be able to completely shave your head down without exposing those scars.
Here is the plan that I’m circling towards and may offer an avenue for some of you as well (I think this may be partiucularly suited for diffuse thinner like myself):
Go for an initial moderate-large size FUE procedure (2.5K-3.5 grafts). I’d really only go with this if you have the funds to go with a top surgeon
Enjoy your denser hair for 5-10 (hopefully!) years and then go for a second FUE procedure as age takes its toll and continues to take your native hair
At this point, in all honesty, you really won’t be able to shave your head with all the FUE scarring. If you still have areas that you’re not happy about, I think it’s wortwhile to look at SMP (maybe temporary at first) into both the FUE scars and in the transplanted recipient area. This helps boost the illusion of density even if you are out of available donor grafts.
I think having a plan for that 3rd step is crucial because there are so many results on here and the forums that end in regret and the person gets stuck because their result is sub-optimal AND they can no longer shave their head due to the scarring.
Hoping to discuss this plan with all you on here perhaps give me something else that I had not considered.
The Master Plan I always discuss with my patients is what happens now for the near and distant future. If hair transplants are in the future for you, you absolutely must know your donor density (a number) which will will deplete with each hair transplant. For FUE, the limit is half of the number as for a strip surgery and if you are not aware of this, then you could end up deformed as I often discuss on this site.
Say I‘m 22 now and my final pattern is NW6 which I will reach by the time I turn 30. I am NW 2 now and my hair loss is not aggressive, medium I would say. Can I maintain the hair for long? If the final pattern is that severe?
The only possibility is the drug finasteride, but I don’t know if you can stop the pattern from developing but you can probably slow down its onset. Get a doctor who specializes in hair restoration like me, who can measure your balding accurately, your donor resources and then follow you as your hair loss situation may or may not change under treat,emt
i’d really appreciate if you could have a glance at these pictures taken with a microscope to confirm whether i have dupa hair loss/miniaturization. pardon the oily hair and hair fragments (recent haircut) :)
There are 9 slightly miniaturized hairs (arrows point to them) out of a total 50 hair count. This is not DUPA as it requires substantially more than 20% of the hairs. Also it is important that these miniaturized hairs are usually part of a follicular unit with at least 2 normal terminal hairs, so your donor hair count may be just dropping slightly, something I see as boys become men, or as men get older.
Yes, especially when the hair loss is in the crown, minoxidil can be very effective. It is less effective in the frontal area.
I have these bumps since I have had my FUE. What is happening to me?
You have what appears to be burried grafts from a faulty FUE technique. These are probably infected buried grafts which will probably require surgical drainage by an expert.
I’m getting an FUT procedure done next week. I’m excited and a little nervous. I’m 29. Still have some hair left on top of head. But my temples are completely bald. Can someone share their experience?
Was it worth the effort and money?
After how long did you see the results?
Any shock loss of existing hair? Did it come back?
Anything else I need to be aware of?
I believe that every man must develop a Master Plan when they start their hair loss, particularly when they start doing a hair transplant because hair loss is progressive and it may, depending upon your balding pattern, keep going if you inherited a Class 7 pattern (the most extreme pattern as this man did: https://baldingblog.com/norwood-class-7-pattern-patient-received-11000-grafts-plus-smp/ ). It is so important that the doctor that you bond with, cares about you and not the size of your bank account. In the example here, I donated the last half of his hair transplants at no charge in exchange for him helping me educate some of my patients, We both got a good deal and he kept his hair for his entire life. I also did his father and his brother and all of his balding friends.
Yes it does look like cobblestonning. I would want to know how your surgeon placed his grafts, what was the size of the grafts. Go back and see your surgeon?
What science there is relates to wound healing. When wounds occur, the body’s response it to mobilize a very aggressive healing process with the production of cytokines (a type of protein) that invokes the immune system and migration of healing cells. This may cause enough stimulation to invoke a hair response to the healing process as well. When this is done with the drug Minoxidil on board, it brings the effects of the minoxidil more to stimulate local absorption. We seem to read article suggesting that minoxidil with dermarollers, seem to work. That is my best guess.
Wondering if you have strong hairloss genes in our family that would make you end up at a NW 5-6 at a rather young age and start taking fin were you still able to maintain?
I have had many patients on finasteride since it came out and never had a hair transplant. These men found that it maintained their hair. A few stopped it and were shocked that they lost hair from stopping it and most quickly went back on it but not everyone grew back what they lost from stopping it. I don’t know if finasteride can stop the final progression of hair loss, but it does seem to hold on to some hair in almost everyone. I personally have been curious to see a person who became a Class 7 pattern male when he was 23, what would have happened to him had he been on finasteride. In other words, could it have stopped the progression to his Class 7 pattern?
There has been a huge effort to get the California Board of Medicine to rule against doctor who use technicians to do their hair transplants in their surgical centers or their offices. This has been a real problem in the field, as technicians have been hired by doctor to do this surgery so that the doctor can ‘CASH IN” on the huge rise in demand for FUE hair transplants. Many of these doctors are not trained in the field of hair restoration, never did a hair transplant and don’t understand the basics of the anesthesia or the surgery but, nevertheless, driven by a desire to MAKE MONEY. These doctors hire technicians, or companies that supply technicians or even nurses to do the surgery for them. We have seen terrible complications, including one death in California from a surgery performed by someone who didn’t know what he was doing. Now it is against the law and any doctor doing this type of phantom surgery (many doctors were not even in the operating room while the surgery was being done), will be subject to California Board of Medicine legal action and could lose their license to practice medicine. Most states follow California on such policy matters so I hope that this ruling will propagate in other states and other countries as well.
CLICK TO ENLARGEWhen I was 17 the temples of my hairline had receded and I now have very minimal crown loss . I’ve been using minoxidil with dermarolling for the last 3 months on my hairline but all I can see are very tiny vellus hairs along my hairline. However for the past couple days I’ve been having day long migraines and I suspect it might be the minoxidil so I’m stopping use until around next week.
Hair transplants are personal decisions. Knowing what you might look like by looking at family members might help you understand better, especially if you can speak with those that are still alive and ask them if they could get their hair back (an completely undetectable hair transplant) would they have done it. You need to sit down with an expert in this field (hair restoration) and get a Master Plan worked out for your future hair loss problems if your hair loss should occur.
This is a self promoting link. PRP has never been proved to be effective or lasting if there is any effect at all. There have been no double blind studies done on PRP with objective measurement devices such as the HAIRCHECK instrument and one has to ask why not. If it worked, there would be many such studies. The folks that wrote this link added nothing to the educational process for readers interested in hair loss.
The premise that hair transplants are not good and don’t last, are baseless. I have been doing hair transplants since 1991 and have seen many of my patients from the early 1990s, keep the hair that they got from the hair transplants. Are article does not pose new science, in fact any science, just claims that are without foundation. Yes, a few hair transplants don’t last the lifetime of the patient (less than2% of patients) but the large majority of patients who had either strip or FUE surgery show great results. One of my first patients who had FUE (see here: https://baldingblog.com/first-fue-patient-north-america/) still comes to our Monthly Open House events to discuss his hair transplant. This is his look today and that alone answers any challenges to the idea that hair restoration is not a good solution to hair loss.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/prp-injections-the-holy-grail-for-hair-regrowth-gets-a-makeover-for-2019-300819493.html