Author: Dr. William Rassman

Have a good laugh

My husband began balding at 24. He is epileptic and a switch to a different anticonvulsant exacerbated what doctors say is genetic hair loss. Within a year, he lost 50% of his hair. Because he lacked health insurance, his doctor refused to allow him off the medication. It was not until it stopped working that we again switched.

Although he stopped taking the medication, his hair never returned. It continued to shed in tremendous amounts. Along with it went his self-esteem and all the things he liked about himself. In June of 2018, we met with a dermatologist that suggested finasteride and Minoxidil 5%. The first photo is from then, when he first began taking 1 mg/day. It is still his current dose. In addition, he uses Kirkland Minoxidil twice a day and Nizoral shampoo three times a week. In addition, he does microneedling once a week. He sure has come a long way and I am proud of him.

Nothing like staying the course

I tell most of my patients that they should use both medications when the area you are treating is small as in this man. Faster than normal response but I can’t tell which of the two medications caused the new hair that is clearly there.

5 weeks on fin and min. Couldn’t be happier so far. from tressless

Great story. When you start early with the approach you used (like prior to the age of 21), the likeliness of these types of results increase significantly. Many times, different hair forums focus on the worst problems that people experience and too few come forward to tell their positive stories, which I know are much more common than most people realize. Congratulations.

The drugs do work. My hair regrowth journey (with pics) from tressless

This is a great video which shows many photos of what to look for in patients, the doctors work and how they do it, the importance of the microscope in every FUE, etc.. The speaker had the worst hair transplant from the 1990s on his own head and had it fixed, but probably put the hairline a tad bit too high. He missed two important nuances of the FUE. (1) The skin of the FUE grafts is trimmed under the microscope. By trimming off most of the skin, the cobbling of the skin, something called cobblestonning (like the old streets which used bricks instead of pavement) produces small elevations of the graft at the point where the skin enters the scalp. (2) The grafts are always placed flush with the skin so that bumps never appear at the point where the grafts enter the scalp. Nevertheless, this is one of the best videos I have seen for evaluating a doctor.

They say than pictures are worth 1000 words, Great results from using finasteride and minoxidil in combination. If he would have been transplanted, the hairline would be lower, halfway between were it is and the highest crease of his furrowed brow which he nicely shows.