Roxithromycin to Treat Hair Loss?
Hi Doc,
I was wondering if you had heard of any new information regarding Neosil’s NEOSH101? This seemed fairly promising for a while but it seems like things have gone silent on this one, has this one bitten the dust?
Also in my travels around the internet i found this, a study based around using roxithromycin lotion to treat baldness. What are your thoughts on it?
Finally i hear a fair amount about Saw Palmetto and how great it is as a natural alternative to Finasteride but if this where true why hasn’t there been any decent studies on it? And why aren’t the producers of it funding studies to prove it works? That indicates to me that perhaps using Saw Palmetto for hairloss is a load of bunk. Surely if they had a product that could potentially help fight baldness you’d think they’d want to be able to prove it scientifically.
Cheers
I haven’t seen any news about Neosil or the NEOSH101 product they were working on. Last I remember, Neosil was bought out by Peplin, who in turn put NEOSH101 on the backburner to focus on their other products (though they said their hair loss treatment would be a future product). I can’t find anything since then…
Regarding using roxithromycin (a drug used to treat infections) as a hair loss treatment, your guess is as good as mine. I’ve never seen such study and the clinical trial link basically says to me that if there was a study they were starting to conduct, it didn’t go anywhere. They haven’t updated any information in years and there are no results or info available. I’ve not even seen any information about why this medication might work as a hair loss treatment.
The saw palmetto / hair loss treatment controversy has yet to be proven. Saw palmetto does not work like finasteride to treat hair loss. People jumped on the bandwagon because saw palmetto is used for prostate treatment, and as you probably know, finasteride is also used for prostate treatment. People put the two together to create pseudoscience through association. The thing is, it is an over-the-counter herbal that is readily available, so nobody is going to take the time or money to fund a proper study. They figure — why prove it when people will buy it regardless? When it comes to hair loss treatments, unfortunately people are willing to spend their money on just about anything with a hint of a promise.
Another reason why nobody will ever fund a proper study of saw palmetto is because the sponsors will never recover their money.
Being a natural product, nobody owns the rights to saw palmetto. Anyone can sell it and tons of companies do. This means that if a drug company spent millions of dollars sponsoring a study of saw palmetto and proved the herb was effective, anybody selling the herb could use the results of the study to boost their own sales.
There would be no benefit to the sponsor of the study, since they could not gain exclusive rights to market the product, like they would if the product was a drug.
Bottom line: They would never regain their investment. This is why you never see large-scale, properly-controlled studies performed on natural supplements. No conspiracies or anything like that, just simple economics.