Hey Dan - So after discontiuning my tonic – I continued to use 5 mg oral Minoxidil daily and Finasteride every other day. I could feel my hair had really thickened and remains that way, so I think the oral medication has done a lot for maintaining thicker and healther hair - which is why I discontinued my tonic. Felt the oral was enough. It was not.
The region that the tonic helped was the very front of hair or forlock and crown. new fine hair growth was there and mid scalp.
That area is where I slowly lost ground.
Now… back on the tonic for a few months and the fine hairs are back in both regions. Can feel them with my fingers.
The fine hairs are probably vellus hairs. You meed them to convert to terminal which requires the deminiturisation of the hair follicle. This is a protein production issue.
I start out a lot more bald than you somethink like Norwood 6 or 7. The area where hair is regrowing at the moment, therefore, has been bald for over a decade. DMT has damaged the mitochondria in the cells and that damage has to be reversed.
You can see near the centre of this image some hairs which were initially vellus (with white tips) that have turned terminal. What I am finding is that once hairs start growing strongly in a pigmented form as long as I keep improving mitochondrial quality the miniaturisation process reverses (very slowly) and the hairs very slowly become thicker.
I have a photograph of this area from May that shows the changes. It is really slow and there is some form of cycling in that hairs appear to start up and then stop (and fall out) and then start up again.
The strong really short hair in this photo is the hair in the centre of the bottom of the picture above.
Good stuff @Agetron. Doesn’t look like you lost much. I know how that feels to go backwards though and it is nerve provoking.
I have been keeping up with the ‘formula’. I added a weekly dose of micro needling and I added dutasteride to a bottle of the formula. I use right before the session. Apparently dutasteride is too big for topicals so micro needling helps get it into the scalp. Too soon to report much other than to say my hair feels thicker a day or two after treatment.
I built a LLT helmet a few years ago when they were super expensive. Been doing that 6 mins a day too.
Aka fighting the good fight. Here is to thicker fuller hair in 2024!!!
Losing your 6 months gains sucks… but I am back on track to retain and even add some.
I see dudes in their early 30’s with bald crowns and extreme frontal loss. I really can’t
complain…even with my higher testosterone from TRT, I am holding my own.
Very happy where I am at… definitely don’t want any losses. Trying to get maximum retention with little effort. I am kinda lazy… diet, gym anything that takes time and effort. Lol.
In the end, however, if it takes me 50 years to get my hair to a state similar to when I was in my 30s and my other bodily functions continue working effectively (I am currently stronger then I was in my teenage years for example). I will live with that.
RU is one of those substances with very questionable safety and efficiacy data. It makes me facepalm hard whenever someone is afraid of finasteride because of “side effects” but instead uses RU, a topical anti-androgen which might go systemic, because of some anecdote on forum/subreddit.
I buy a lot of stuff on Ali but I only trust them on appliances and electronics—would never buy there anything I planned on ingesting or even topical pharmaceuticals. Some folks here are very brave indeed.
You may also try oral minoxidil 2mg per day, which is very effective and even more so when combined with topical applications. Any resulting unwanted body hair can be lasered away. Finasteride/dutasteride can be applied topically or taken orally and perhaps topical route could be a good option for a woman. Another option is if you don’t have access to finastride/dutasteride is topical Alfatradiol, which can be safely used by women, like ell-Cranell from galderma. Good luck!
