ciaus

Its best to start on fin at least a year before the transplant, not only to strengthen your hairs to help prevent shock loss, but also because depending on how well you respond you may re-gain a substantial amount of hair that will change how much hair you end up actually needing to be transplanted. So you have more money and hair for later if you need more transplants. Starting it 2 weeks before the procedure is also going to make it difficult to evaluate how successful your hair transplant is, because it usually takes a few months to notice the initial results from the finasteride which is going to coincide with the 3 to 4 month time period when your transplanted hair starts coming in. Maybe your doctor doesn't do that good of a job, but you are a really good responder to the finasteride, so that helps him to cover his butt. Most guys want their transplants done yesterday, I was the same way, but for best results its best to wait a year after you've been on fin.

Without a DHT blocker like finasteride, minoxidil, the oral and the topical versions, is only going to help enhance your vulnerable hairs until the DHT flowing through your body causes you to ultimately lose those hairs. Just be sure that you are aware of that, minoxidil is not a long term solution for keeping your hair. There's also shampoos with ketoconazole like Nizoral, but that's going to only help you marginally. There's lesser known and used options that may give you some results like dermarolling, although with that most of the guys on here are also using minoxidil so hard to say how good that works all by itself, I wouldn't expect too much. And there's laser caps, but I would put even less hope in that for any meaningful results, more of a marginal thing too that hardcore guys do along with everything else I've mentioned.

4 months post-op there's nothing you can't do that you were doing before. Grafts have been secured under the skin connected to their new blood supplies for months. And you are past the ugly ducking phase, four months is where most guys start to see some good growth.

Its not just us laymen, even your medical researchers are very limited when it comes to resources and experiments. The Bernstein link is from almost 20 years ago with oddball transplants to eyebrows and legs. And the other link from last year is one study of only a 112 patients, from authors and patient subjects that look like they are from India, about as trustworthy as Turkey when it comes to getting botched transplants. There's not enough evidence supporting this to be on the typical guy's radar thinking about getting a transplant.

This is where we fundamentally disagree, this forum is not the optimal place for "all possible scenario" speculations, especially negative ones, to be endlessly debated. Its about practical knowledge and research substantiated with real results to help people improve their lives. Some of the vulnerable paranoid guys coming here looking for help may not have the clarity of thought like you to put all this into proper perspective, and instead may needlessly rule out getting a hair transplant, spiraling deeper into depression, trying crazy drugs and other unsubstantiated potions instead. Melvin do you have plans to put this on youtube? I don't do social media and didn't find it when I just searched.

I do and not sure when it started, I was using rogaine in the same area and I figured that was causing the irritation, and wasn't diagnosed until after the HTs. Thankfully it's never spread to my donor or front where all the work has been done so I've held on to everything. Nobody knows what causes LPP, basically the immune system attacking your hair follicles for god knows why. You definitely don't want to transplant hair into any area with active LPP, it will attack those transplanted hair follicles just like it did the original ones. The consensus I've read online and from my doc is to not consider transplanting until the area has been inactive for a few years -which is not so easy to determine because it can still be attacking your hair follicles under the skin even when there are no symptoms of redness, irritation etc on the skin surface. I'd get at least one biopsy to confirm if your LPP does seem to go dormant for a few years, and fingers crossed it will sleep forever! Best of luck and if you do get that HT be sure to have your meds ready to help protect those hairs as much as possible if it flares back up.

Nope, no skin irritation at all. Unless someone has a weird allergy to minoxidil that I've never heard of, it's not a skin irritant by itself. The skin irritation from the topical comes from the other ingredients in the formula, like propylene glycol, that help to penetrate the skin so that the minoxidil gets absorbed.

Confirming that an apple hits the ground, if only hair loss in humans had one cause like gravity. Your analogy is terrible. Aside from dht and the currently known genes involved in hair loss, there are almost certainly other unknown genes directly and indirectly involved, molecular level chemistry, individual environmental and lifestyle factors, immune system malfunctions, diseases known and still unknown, the aging process, etc. The root causes of hair loss can be ridiculously complex and we'll probably never fully understand all of them. And any one or combination of those would be enough to choke out a donor hair where it currently lives or after you move it. Unlike the other discussions started on this, I can honestly say Melvin's comes from good intentions. To the small minority of you that aren't trolling my advice would be to do the doomsday speculations somewhere else until there's a strong body of evidence and studies to support them. Guys coming to this forum are often in a vulnerable place, desperate, even paranoid, willing to do and try things that could seriously compromise their health trying to hang on to their hair. There's a burden of responsibility we all have and should appreciate, because how and what we post can make the difference in whether these guys get to a better or worse place when it comes to their hairloss.

I've always wondered about Leno, think he's one of those guys like John Kerry that goes big with a bold grey skull cap hair piece.

Exactly. Millions have been taking it for decades, myself included, no problems. Is the second link about the same story from a different website supposed to give this more weight? This is copy pasted from that one: "European and Canadian regulators, citing similar reports among men taking finasteride, require a warning of suicidal thoughts on the label, though they note that research has not proved that the drug causes such thoughts. And there you have it. And no surprise that Canada and Europe make policy that's not based on research. For now this remains a class action lawyer's wet dream.

There are probably some hair follicles even in the donor that check out as we get farther into our senior years at the margins, part of the general falling-apart of the aging process, but nothing on the scale that recent, less than sincere IMO, topics want to suggest. I think alot of the heat in this debate is actually coming from a much smaller source, people creating multiple user accounts/posts. I feel for those that are sincere and were probably burned by a bad doc/procedure that took hair outside of the safe zone, or that have some undiagnosed medical condition causing the loss. But I have no sympathy for the trolls doing this that just get off on causing drama. And there are too many excellent, highly intelligent HT doctors out there who could be working in other specialties in the medical industry making great money, etc. If HTs really only lasted a few years before falling out, it makes no sense that so many of them would risk compromising themselves ethically, financially and legally.

I've been on 2.5mg pill daily since around aug/sept last year and I've responded better to it, notice hair all over my head is thicker instead of just the areas I was applying it before. I couldn't stay on the topical because of scalp conditions that it irritated. I'm in the US and you do need a prescription for it, got that from a hair transplant doc in my area, local pharmacy is where I pick it up. And its pretty cheap. 2 month supply is about $25 without insurance. I use goodrx to get about a $10 discount. If you're in the US go here and set your location to see what local pharmacies around you charge: https://www.goodrx.com/minoxidil

I had a little bit of lightheadness the first few weeks. I have more beard and chest hair. Never had back hair and still don't thankfully.

The forum moderator Melvin started a topic here on oral minoxidil:

The part where he shows how much additional hair is growing on the back of his hand after starting minox is pretty funny. He posts a little text question on the screen asking if he should start finasteride. Does dermarolling have any known effect on DHT and hair follicle receptors, etc? Because in the long run he may be just moving the chairs around on the Titanic if he's not going to do anything about DHT.

And don't forget about the exercise regimen, alternating days of derma-rollering and wearing your lasercap while on the treadmill.

@JohnAC71 in reply to your confusion, the parade of threads about HTs being temporary and falling out with no supporting evidence

I see this is your first post, is it your first account too?

hmmm that sounds familiar...

Thats an interesting question, I've seen smp artists asked about grey hair but its always been in the context of guys that are going to keep their head shaved forever. The reply there is that even grey hair when shaved down to a 0 guard looks like darker hair, the grey coloring manifests as the hair shaft grows longer. I would expect they would be able to layer the gray ink on as the years go by. We have a member here @hairthere that runs a clinic and he should be able to help answer that.

Yea big red flags, showing the pre-op pic with wet hair to make the scalp as visible as possible, and then in the post pics it's not only dry but there's got to be some concealer applied to the actual hairs unless the guy got a HT too. These are the first post-op pics I've seen where the person is letting their hair grow out and the clinic is putting concealer on the hairs too. Definitely steer clear of them.

Replied to your post over in the smp section before noticing you had a topic here for a recent HT. Front really looks good, as you age that will continue to frame your face realistically. Thinking about both your threads, its great that you are working from home for the foreseeable future. I'm in the same boat for the rest of the year at least and in 2022 the company is restructuring their office space leasing so that being in the office will be optional and for those that do come in it will be rotational. Its a great time to be getting these kinds of procedures done discretely. I hear your frustration about the crown growth and wishing the final result was yesterday. If you're itching to add some smp back there now, I'd try to wait until at least a year if not the full 18 mos and be evaluated for how much additional real hair would get the job done first. Since you'll have your hair longer the ink would be like a permanent concealer which means you'll probably be able to go alot more years in between ink touch ups than guys that shave their heads...but still, in my opinion, given how much beard hair you have in addition to what ever is still available in your scalp donor, I would rather have as much real hair back there than ink as possible. And then use the ink to blend and conceal future loss after your donor areas are all tapped out.

I'm in the midwest too looking to do some smp later this year. Don't do instagram so I can't see that link, but googled and found a newportsmp.com website, maybe that's the same place. Looked at the 'our team' part of the site and 2 of 3 are former nurses, not that impressed with their BIOs, but that's just my opinion. There is a great site called teammicro that's sort of a hybrid industry/consumer-education where you can learn alot, and you can find a few recommended clinics per location all over the world too, here's the link to the US: https://www.teammicro.com/smp/us/

There are some recommended clinics in this link in Canada including the one @kirkland mentioned https://www.teammicro.com/smp/canada/ Looks like Dr Rahal still has an SMP artist with him https://www.rahalhairtransplant.com/smp-toronto/

yea I needed to more frequently during surgery, from the start I'm thinking that I don't want to slow down or break up the momentum of the staff doing the work, and of course when you think about something it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. lol