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Give it more time (a year or so) and then you will not need to ask if it is working

5 Months Fin: Is it working? Too soon to tell? from tressless

Doc, i have a question, Does it happen usually that someone stops reacting to the current dosage and has to move to higher concentrated dosages. Ex, someone stops reacting to 1mg finestride and has to move to 2mg to keep seeing results. I am kinda scared of it, I started with 1mg per day, but later came across someone mentioning it, so I reduced the dosage to 1mg every alternate day, bcoz 0.5mg per day wasn’t available. Was it a smart move or me just believing in a myth?

The original Merck studies showed that the 1mg dose was the ideal dose for hair loss. Half that dose is 82% as effective, so taking a pill every other day is essentially half the dose and it should still be 82% effective in your situation.

This is a wonderful result from finasteride and minoxidil used for 6 months

Scalp Micropigmentation (SMP) is a cosmetic tattoo. It is not hair and should not be looked at as if it was hair. However, for people with thinning hair, SMP may be the single most effective approach for treating diffuse thinning, giving the patient more value for the amount spent doing it. Hair transplants are much more expensive than SMP. When thinning hair occurs in many people, hair transplants work poorly, particularly when the thinning is diffuse (covers much of the scalp). Many doctors who do not know how to do SMP seem to gravitate to what they do know. So, these doctors recommend hair transplants rather than SMP, even though an SMP procedure would be better for the patient. For diffuse thinning (a common finding in 50% of women with hair loss), hair transplants can’t obtain enough grafts to increase the overall density to a level that will satisfy the patients. SMP, on the other hand, reduces the contrast between hair and skin color so well that it increases the appearance of fullness to a normal level in most people. A comparable hair transplant, if a patient have enough hair, could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Even if one could afford the procedure, few people have enough hair to fill in a diffuse thinning hair pattern (in either women or men). So, we offer SMP for patients with thinning hair, regardless of the cause. These patients are the happiest patients we have. I would say that our overall satisfaction rate far exceeds 95% because, unlike hair transplant where the hair loss continues to progress, SMP addresses the entire thinning problem in the short time frame while it is being done, regardless of the hair loss progression that may be present. Patients who had SMP rarely return for more treatments once the process is complete.

Photography should be comparable. I suspect that you believe that it is better, so it must be because you manage it, but it doesn’t show up well. Get more comparable photos or give it another 6-12 months and then the results should jump off the page, good luck!

Nobody knows if there is a connection between Diffuse Unpatterened Alopecia (DUPA) and the action of DHT on the hair receptors. but I doubt that it fits the classic model for male pattern genetic loss; nevertheless, because finasteride is the only drug that we can use to block DHT and we know that sometimes it works, finasteride is the drug of choice for DUPA. People with DUPA can also develop patterned balding which shows that there is not a direct connection between the two.

A hair transplant in one session is never normal hair density for the size of the area you are transplanting. You can see it by looking at the lack of density of the grafts, but in your case, the area covered could have had more grafts. I don’t like the line-up of the hairs that were transplanted as they should have been more randomly placed. Your grafts were placed far too orderly for me but another hair transplant with more random placement of the grafts will solve this problem and give you more density. If this is the way your doctor does his transplants, I would look for another doctor.

This patient used nizoral shampoo, finasteride and minoxidil and in just 7 months had almost a complete reversal of the crown hair loss, not an unusual occurrence.