Month: January 2023

Thanks Dr. Rassman. Any basis for why it will not absorb? Minoxidilmax.com one of the longest running topical finasteride sellers said this on DIY:

“If you want to make your own topical finasteride at 0.1 percent to save money, you should be able to do that with the right tools and material. No need to be a scientist to do so. The only tool you need is a scale that is accurate to 1mg level. All you need to do is to weigh 60 mg of pure finasteride power and pour it into a bottle of 60 ml minoxidil solution, close the bottle and shake it for 10 minutes.

The real challenge here is not how to make it but how to obtain good quality of finasteride material. Some people choose to use 5 mg finasteride pills (Proscar). In this case, you will need to pulverize 12 pills and then put the powder into a bottle of 60 ml minoxidil solution. Shake it very hard for 10 minutes. Let the bottle stand still for overnight and pour the clear solution to another bottle for use. The reason why it is recommended to dissolve the powder into a minoxidil solution is that it has right solvent that ensures the good absorption of the topical finasteride. You can’t just use pure alcohol as the solvent, because it evaporates too faster and you will end up with flakes of finasteride on your scalp that will never be absorbed.

With the 0.1% topical solution, you receive 1 mg finasteride if you use the solution once a day. If you use the homemade solution above twice daily, your finasteride dosage is actually 2 mg a day.”

This question is a moving target tied to instrumentation issues. Some doctors have done a) half FUE and b) half strip and measured growth differences and there were none. There are certain patients that FUE will cause damage, that group is a subset of those I called Fox negative patients in my original article. This group of Fox negative patients has contracted to a smaller number because of better and better instrumentation that has developed over the years. In that small sub-set of patients, there is no doubt that FUE is an inferior surgery and that sub-group, unfortunately, can’t be identified in advance, so each individual takes some risk that they may be in this sub-group when they elect to get FUE. Maybe this sub-group is 5% of all FUE patients, maybe less, but for them it is 100% less quality surgery because there is more damage to the grafts during harvesting. This presents the problem as if it is black and white, but there are gray areas in this sub-group that may make the sub-group larger than 5%. The strip doesn’t have that risk.

Vellus hairs are the short hairs that are mixed in with each follicular group of normal hairs. Miniaturized hairs are hairs that have lost their thickness and are noticeably thinner than the hairs on the back of your head.

It may be tied to your age and how long you have been bald. The longer you are bald (10-40 years) the less likely anything will grow. Is there any hair present?

It’s been reported that Dutasteride raises scalp Testosterone by nearly 100%. I don’t know if thats bro science or what. When I took fin for 10 years, my hair line didn’t move a cm. Since taking dut for 7 months, my hair line has went from a thick NW1 to an approaching NW2.5-NW3. I can see the pattern taking shape, although I’m about a NW1.5 now. Can Scalp Testosterone cause damage to hair follicles, particular the front where they may be more sensitive to T in general? Thinking of going back to fin and cutting my losses. Enough is enough

The model for hair loss is for DHT, which is a metabolite in the breakdown of testosterone by the body. Norwood Class 1 and 2 have juvenile hairlines and the leading edge of these hairlines do not respond to DHT blockers like finasteride, so using drugs to hold onto your juvenile hairline makes no sense and just will not work.

The issue is the doctor not the machine that does the surgery. Is the doctor really an expert in this field? Make sure that the doctor has his own staff and doesn’t bring in hired staff to do the surgery for him/her which is not only illegal but common with some of these systems (see: https://baldingblog.com/death-during-hair-transplant-surgery/). Too many doctors are just in this business for the money and don’t take training on their own. They buy a ‘Machine’ and then hire out the entire surgery team and often don’t participate in it, pocketing a fair amount of the money collected from you. I had seen situation where the doctor left the surgery with technicians who did the surgery. What would happen if something went wrong, could you die? If happened before and you wouldn’t want to be the next.

For the bald man that wants hair cover, he should let the side hair grow long enough to be able to sweep the hair from one side to the other. Once that is done, the center part of the long hair is pulled forward to the eyebrows. The final product is the last picture, a damn good covered hairline very common in many men who slowly bald over time. The problems occur when the bald area becomes too large and the amount of hair that is grown from the sides is both too low on the fringe area and too short, and you get the failed comb-over shown in the last picture. Note that the comb-over just doesn’t last as you can see in the gray hair suggesting that this man let his comb-over go on too long. The last set of photos I found on Google images which shows how creative some people can be to get their hair covering their bald area. This photos is not as outlandish as it may appear as this is called a Bouffant and is not infrequently built from scalp hair. In my 29 years of practice, I have seen such Bouffants on a number of men. I remember one man who got up at 2:30 am every morning to build the Bouffant hair by hair (a three hour process). His Bouffant looked good enough to fool me when we first met, but when I unwound his hair, he was fairly bald. He had two hair transplants and told me that these transplants changed his life. He now slept to as long at 7:00 am without worrying about his hair and was able to engage in activities with his children, including swimming and vacations in places that he never thought he would travel to.