blufforfold

For sure, i dont expect my hair loss to be finalized completely, but the areas I am talking about are significantly safe zones in comparison to hairline, crowns etc - the temple having more hair loss isn't a surprise that it came at some point, but its strange that the sides towards the bottom near my ear and the hairline on my neck are whats thinning... those are not at all typical spots for someone with my hair loss at 32 y/o and only began after taking Fin

Appreciate it, its just a strange coincidence I guess because Im theoretically thinning in some strange areas like super safe areas and im not even an advanced loser or aggressive loser at all so its just been weird to see new areas that had previously no issues at all and are pretty safe all of a sudden feeling thin

Thanks for the reply. Thats what I thought. Its just such a strange coincidence and whats weird is its thinning in weird areas it feels like. It kinda reconfirmed for me when I got a haircut a few days ago and the hairdresser told me about raising my hairline a tad like I said because the natural point wasn't straight. Ive gotten essentially the same style haircut for nearly 8 years now, never had someone say that until the other day. Very strange

I am not diligent enough in photo taking and Im in a rush been very busy lately so I apologize if this is a huge repeat question as it might be. In general is it noticed by physicians that in some percentage of patients that Fin actually makes hair loss worse? I know there will be non responders but how about making things worse. My hair just overall feels thinner throughout my scalp tbh and then a few specifics. I personally feel the back of my head below the donor zone has gotten thinner and my hairdresser commented for the first time that she brought my neck hairline up slightly because it wasn't even and some areas were longer than others (thinning?) and also I am feeling i am seeing skin through my hair way easier right next to my ears on my sides. Now Im feeling like my right side temple which was already worse than my left but IMO has been like that for years and years and hasn't really shifted much in a while is all of a sudden in a 2 month span showing signs of receding further to the point where I actually noticed something in such a short period. I never once have even been very concerned about my hairloss in the front only my crown as you can see from my thread(s) and now all of a sudden I feel like I should be concerned about my temples. I have been on oral Fin for about 11 months. I am seeing July 7 2021 on my calendar. Ive kinda bounced around between 3x a week (MWF) to Every other day to also 5x a week as well. Right now I am doing MWF at 1mg. (Always been 1mg). Ive used a few different pharmacies, is there a known place I should go to? CVS? Walgreens? Etc? I know there can be a "shedding phase" and I dont think thats it. About 7 or 8 months in is where I started to wonder if it was making things worse. Again in a bit of a rush so I will link to my other thread to get an idea of my hair loss. On my crown I think things have been relatively similar maybe things got slightly worse, its honestly hard for me to tell. I have photos from late 2020 and then also in Early 2022 and I personally think they are marginally comparable. I also started red light cap. It almost feels like the more I do the worse things get tbh and when I did nothing things were progressing the least. Obviously I'm aging and it could very easily be coincidence but not sure.

Thanks for the reply again Dr. At a Norwood 5 should my donor be sufficient to have decent coverage into my 40s and 50s? I still consider myself a bit of a newbie but it seems like as long as I went with a good surgeon I would have enough grafts, maybe not for a super low hairline if it got worse than expected but at least something reasonable. You can DM me some hair piece companies, I will look into it. I am not comfortable going on minoxidil if you think that the risk of accelerated loss is not unrealistic. I really doubt I will be on it for life and I totally get what you mean by mechanism of action, it makes sense why minox would happen more than finasteride. Would you think that natural products would also cause a similar thing if they happened to work for an individual? I know we consider most natural products to be snakeoil but lets say someone used something like Revivv and it worked for that individual, would you see a similar risk of accelerated loss when continuing to minox or minox specifically As far as shockloss, like someone above commented, should I basically consider all my native hear in my crown dead and a surgeon would basically totally disregard it and implant as if that hair doesn't exist at all and wont be there? Lets say I didnt want to do the hairpiece and I wanted to move forward with a surgery, what would your advice be to me? Do you think I could achieve something decent with 2000-ish grafts with a good surgeon, stay on fin and see what happens? I am also new to LLLT which might thicken up the hairs some as well.

Ah I see, but I do feel like quite a lot of the times when its on the crown, those people dont have any prior surgeries on the crown so the area of native hair actually is their natural native hair. I do get your distinction but in a lot of the examples when someone is losing lets say 80% front and 20% crown and they just leave their crown untouched until later surgeries, those crown areas dont have transplanted hairs so should theoretically be susceptible all the same. In that case would you feel I should be worried about perm shock loss in my situation if I want to do a crown surgery?

Question about shockloss. We see a lot of people with minimal hair loss (I even have been warned about shockloss though I have more hairloss than OP) but when it comes to people getting their 2nd,3rd,4th surgeries we rarely see anybody comment about shockloss, why is that? You see people thickening up their hairline, and we certainly see lots of crown surgeries on surgery 2/3/4 when the person is already pretty full sometimes they are just doing that list fill if 500-700 grafts in the crown. Why are those people never told that they are risking shock-loss but then people in OPs position are always told that they are risking shockloss. Im a newbie so I dont understand the double standard, is there an actual reason for this? IMO this happens even in cases when somebody has no prior surgery in the crown and never had that bad of crown to beginwith, so lets say a NW3 or even a NW4 who happens to have a not overly bad crown, comes in for his 2nd or 3rd surgery for the crown with tons of native hair and nobody ever talks about shockloss that ive seen in those threads doing my research lately

Did you ever go back to Dr. Gabel with your concerns? Looking at Gabel and curious about this "negative" result. Let me know if you are still around and receive updates. Would love to hear what happened and whether you spoke to Dr. Gabel about your results

Can I ask if youre still around why you think that it was the Fin that grew your crown rather than the minox? From what Ive read minox is praised more in the crown than anywhere else and fin is less likely to even grow hair rather than just keep.

Ty for the reply Dr, means a lot to have a physician reply. A few questions 1) A little surprised to hear you say 3000 as that is the most I have heard and I did about 4 online consults and 2 in person. You also said "at least" which sounds like 3000 is more towards your bottom number. 2) In your experience with my type of hair loss, what do you think my future hairloss will be like or do you find my hairloss pattern to be too strange to tell? Would love input from someone who sees as many patients as you have. 3) Im not sure you interpreted my point about maintaining my hair, what I meant to get across is I care a lot more about my hair from now at 32 until my low 40s than I do about my hair after that. I would hope that I have found my woman in the next 10-ish years and after that I am not as concerned. Not because all there is in life is finding and getting women but more so that once you start to have a family etc naturally your priorities shift and how you look to friends and colleagues matters less and at that age it also simply is more common and acceptable. 4) In your experience do you have patients who have started meds and then their hair accelerated upon stopping those meds? 5) Can you point me into a few hair piece companies? I didnt even look at that route. I still find this similar to concealers but I will not say I am 100% opposed to it.

Thats pretty incredible work. I am trying to do my best to look at results from various Drs but honestly not many people are posting crown results. Dr. Wong seems very good to me but uses a lot of grafts to get his results, which does concern me as I havent lost much in my hairline but no idea what will come for me in the future. Dr. Konior seems very good, concerned about his prices and wait time however, for me it will depend what his confidence level is at what graft count when I do a consult with him. If hes confident in using a lower number of grafts with my desired fullness I will definitely consider him as an option. Dr. Wesley has actually impressed me when looking at his results and it seems like he does a lot of no shave surgeries which is great for me. He has now become someone I am 100% doing a consult with and considering for my crown work. Dr. Ahmad at Fuegenix has some great crown results on the website but I did not like some of the replies I saw on the website from them. Would love if anybody could comment more as to their work, going to look more at their results on this website. Eugenix results seem to be mostly large surgeries but they do have some good crown results on their website, but I think with my desire to have a top notch result I would think most people will suggest I see someone like Dr. Konior, Wong or Wesley rather than Eugenix. Dr. Bisanga - honestly again I admit Im a newbie but his results are not impressive to me at all. I do respect that he uses low graft counts but both his before/after on his page on the website & the reuslts in the group do not impress me at all as a newbie. I would not be happy with the density and lack of coverage in almost 50% of the results I see from him but he is using low graft counts for sure. Would love some input on why I seem to not be impressed by his results at all? Dr. Freitas - still looking into him but seems to have incredible results but I cant find any crown results from him so far. If anybody knows of any that would be great. Dr. Gabel - I would say the end results Ive seen from him are close to what I would want but he is using pretty low graft counts so I think I would get decent coverage and not destroy my donor with him Who else should I be looking at that isn't on this list? I am open to travel anywhere, more than open to going to EU if Elite Drs there are better than USA for less money which I keep continually reading.

Just editing a post I made about PRP that was way too long. I was seeing a sports pysician who advised me to get PRP on the scalp with him which IMO was a mistake and caused my hair to get worse about 3-3.5 years ago. We did like 8 injections in an 8 week period or so. Way too much and IMO he didnt know what he was doing cause you guessed it he was a sports physician. Im sure PRP done by a hair clinic wont make things worse but the pattern of my hair loss followed the exact pathing he used for his injections. I had no mid-scalp at all prior to the injections which were on my crown + mid scalp and my crown got worse too, certainly didnt decrease my hairloss thats for sure, at best it did nothing

Yeah I dont know its pretty weird, maybe its not the case. Im not saying definitively it has, I never had thin sides so didnt pay attention to them but these days they do randomly look thin? Tbh IDK but I do suspect I had a natural slight widows peak. The left might be my natural and the right went up a little bit is my guess, but ive had this hairstyle for something like 10 years now and just never really looked as I had no signs of losing hair so never thought twice about it. I can try to find some old photos of me as a later teenager with long hair I tied back a lot and see how my temples look there. Why do you say oral minox over topical? Id probably feel less comfortable taking oral. I definitely plan to talk to the Drs about the meds and also the risk of stopping them and acceleration occurring. Dont think theres literature on it but Drs may know. Dr Wong is who I was originally looking at the 2nd research round when I was looking for crown results and then learned about Dr. Konior on here. Both are going to have incredibly long waits which is a big bummer and really expensive but Im starting to think that might be what I need if my goals are to be achieved, hopefully Ill get more feedback from people on other Physician options as well in my situation

Thanks, this is what most people told me in my consults in Dec 2020. They felt my hair was good enough and a lot of balding men would be plenty happy with my current situation and they dont think I need a HT but were okay with operating on me if thats what I wanted. I am tolerating Fin I believe, my mental has gone down since then but its also possible it is unrelated. Sex drive is still there. Is shock loss risk at all relevant to skill of surgeon? Genuinely asking, do you rate my donor as average mostly because of the side shots? I really feel my sides have thinned since starting Fin, it could be that I pushed out some weaker hairs, not sure, its been almost 9 months. I didnt pay attention to the sides that strongly but I never felt I thought they were even remotely thin but I do feel they like just a tad thin these days I had online consults with a handful of people with photos and the lowest graft quote I got was 1500 from Dr Yazdan and the highest I got was 2500 from Dr Scott Alexander in AZ. As I asked above, is there more risk associated with shock loss the less skilled the surgeon is and the equipment they use? Not much discussion took place with my previous consults about shock loss but its definitely something I will discuss in my newer consults. EDIT: one last question about FUE vs FUT total grafts available vs how many I will need down the road. Do we have any guesses as to my final advancement of hair loss with my age, my current hair loss, and my dad/brothers hair loss? They both had a lot of front hairline loss and I dont yet so IDK doesn't feel like I am following their pattern. I also had a huge trauma to the back of my head as a child, could have been the beginning of why my thinning at crown first. I had surgery and nearly broke my skull.

Thanks I also made a much more detailed thread here which is more than just about "crown surgeons" but more about me, more photos etc - I just made it @DrTBarghouthi

Hey all looking for some guidance, I am 32 y/o and mostly balding in the crown and some mid scalp. I had no idea what so ever I was balding until I had some friends show me a pic from the rear and was like woah wtf is that! Nobody ever said anything to me. It was pretty mild back then. just a small spot on either side of the center of my crown. Since then basically nobody has seen my bald spots and nobody even knows im balding since my front hair line is pretty strong and they thought I just "handled it" so to speak. Nobody has mentioned it to me other than a handful asking what supplements i took to help my hair. This was at around 27-28 but dont think I have great photos of it back then but its been a solid 5+ years or so and now im at where im at. I started oral fin reluctantly about 8 months ago. Part of me feels like the sides of my hair are thinner than they were prior to getting on Fin. My balding areas are probably about the same as 8 months ago. But my hair loss was fairly slow so im not sure if its actually helping or not. I just started HappyHead which is topical fin + minox 8% and retinol acid. Tbh I think im gonna stop & go back to oral fin because I dont think im going to be willing to take meds for life and I have a small fear that meds and then stopping has a chance to accelerate my hair loss (i made a thread about this with only a handful of replies), I plan to ask the physicians this during consults. I know some of you will say, youre 32 and your youve still got a lot of hair especially in the front so relax and just use some minox and microneedle etc and youll be fine and reacess a HT later, dont waste your grafts on the crown at only 32. The truth is I like to do a lot of sports, hiking, beach etc and its just not realistic to keep going covering it up for that much longer. Id say I have like 2 years max where its going to be pretty hard to cover up from those type of actives which sweat and water will naturally take away fibers + dermatch and as of right now basically nobody I know knows that I am losing hair and none of the women I meet know I am losing my hair. I had a few consults in December of 2020 mostly online but I really knew nothing. Now I realize how many questions I didnt ask but I spoke to only members of IHRAS so I assume most here will think they are at least pretty ethical and everyone I spoke to was willing to work on me but most people just said my hair looked good so why get a HT and nobody cares about the crown haha. Since then I have learned about the more complexities about crown restorations and how I need to also think about the future HTs and "island" of hair in crown. My initial gameplan was to just get around 2-2.5k total grafts mostly to the crown and then maybe 250-350 in the mid scalp. I wanted FUE because I didnt want the scar and that was more important to me than the cost. Now I am learning about how if you want to maximize grafts going FUT into FUE is ideal? I dont know what level I will bald to and hoping for some analysis on that. My dad is hard to tell he shaves his head and had a HT like 20-30 years ago and he doesnt even remember specifics of it. If I had to guess hes around a Norwood 5. My brother is 36 and around a Norwood 3.5 he was also much further along than I was at 32 and always had hairline and temple recession and I really dont have a lot (IMO). One doctor looked at my hairline in a microscope which was Dr. Benham in Santamonica, CA. He didnt seem to be too concerned about my front hairline miniaturization that he was seeing at the current time (this was pre-meds). He said I probably have 7000+ grafts lifetime and Dr. Yazdan in Newport Beach, CA told me I have a fairly strong donor (his microscope was broken however that day) and that I have 7000 or maybe 8000 in his opinion eyeballing it. Im trying to give as much info about me, my goals and my priorities so those who want to help are able 1) I am not naturally someone who likes pharmaceutical drugs. Ive been into fitness and health for my whole life basically so even taking fin is pretty hard for me mentally. I have very low feeling I will be able to perm take Minox which is why im scared to keep going and have it backfire when I stop. Fin Im on for now but to be totally frank its not a guarantee I will be willing to do it for 10-15-20 years. 2) I am more concerned about my hair from today until my early 40s than I am having a thick head of hair at 45+. I am single still and I dont want my hair to be the reason my confidence goes down and my lack of getting some women to be my hair. This is one issue with me now realizing that all the best docs for crown are going to be 12 months out and then another 12-18 months for it to come in full. Huge bummer now that Im realizing all this. I shoulda done this back in Dec 2020 and kept going on my research id be getting my transplant right now. 3) Crown results - I think I have a higher expectation than reality is going to have for me. I would want to basically have nobody tell im thinning unless they really were looking for it. I know this makes me sound like a snob as HTs are not perfect science and im not trying to be but the main thing that really gets me is that when im seeing a woman and they have NO CLUE i am balding because I wear fibers or dermatch. I just wanna get beyond the point of wearing any concealers 4) I am willing to travel anywhere I would say. That doesn't bother me have a lot of flexibility work-wise and can make just about any time and any place happen. Cost is going to be tough to swallow but depending on the advice I get, I willing to pay for "the best" if everything else checks out and is making sense. So now some questions I have moving forward 1) How do we rate my donor area? How concerned should I be about harvesting too much donors for this current crown + mid scalp procedure 2) How do we rate my hair loss in general and how bald do we think I will go in our best guesses? 3) Who are the doctors I should be considering, for this I would love to get "the best" in your opinion and then maybe 1-2 options that you still highly recommend that will have lower than a 12 month wait time? As of right now this is my list I want to consult with but still open to adding and removing based on feedback here: Dr Wong, Dr Konior, Dr Ahmad, Dr Bisanga, Dr Wesley, Dr Bloxham/Feller, Dr Sethi 4) If I am concerned about longevity should I be going for FUT first or is FUE fine? 5) Should I be concerned with shockloss, is the doctors skill level relevant here? I have a good amount of native hair in my recipient area, both crown and mid scalp 6) As I said, almost nobody in my life knows I am having significant hair loss. What would be my best way to try and conceal this transplant? I would love to keep as much hair as I can long and immediately go back to wearing fibers soon after to conceal. Will some Drs be better at this and more comfortable? Im okay with shaving my donor area, but its mostly from the bottom of my balding area up that I would want to shave as little or none as possible. Not sure if anybody offers this, seen a little about it. Currently I am doing: LLLT Every other day Oral Fin 5x a week 1mg Biotin Let me know if I need l better pics, the last 2 crown photos one is on a cloudy day outside Dec 2020 and the other one is a few days ago with harsh noon sun beaming right on me, so the worst possibly lighting. Id say its pretty similar and hasnt moved much since Dec 2020? What is weird tho is it does feel like I need to use more fibers and more dermatch than I used to. Especially dermatch. The bathroom photos are all from tonight.

Thanks, does look like they are confident in their results. I will add them to the list. I am going to make a much more detailed and researched thread in the surgeons page with better pics of all 4 sides including expectations and future goals.

What do you mean by this, as to why he's limited his search to CA? I am in CA too and looking for a crown surgeon, I plan to take better pics of all angles which I think will give me more feedback than the current thread I made. Crowns seem to be such a small percentage of surgeries especially as a first/only surgery its hard to find good info on surgeons and results even

Bump I really dont see a lot of talk about crowns its always the afterthought

This isn't to say Fin or Minox dont work. But to give an example. Lets say someone took Fin/Min for 2 years then stopped taking it and proceeded to accelerate his hairloss in the 3rd year. Is there evidence in that 3 year period some people experience more hairloss because of the acceleration after coming off fin and/or minox than they would have if they just took nothing for 3 years. Im not saying this is the case, but I see in some of these stories im reading that people were on meds and stopped and its not just that their hair started falling out faster, it seems to have accelerated at a pace that they had never experienced prior to being on the meds. It could just be coincidence but I read a few of them. Stupidly I didnt save any of them but I was just curious if there's any evidence of that and some people on here seem to be into hair loss for years or decades and there's a lot of clinics even on here who likely have thousands of patients on these meds over the last 10-20 years and would have an idea

But not with Fin?

Just a thought I was having after reading some various posts that werent asking this question but seemed to be a common theme Is there any evidence that starting meds like fin/minox and then stopping can lead to more hairloss than one would have had in the same time period having never started meds? I would think theres some pretty experienced users and also clinics/Drs on here who would have seen thousands of patients over the last 10 years to know. Just curious, this isnt happening to me as I only started fin about 8 months ago and havent stopped and just started minox about a week ago

Its not that I think PRP generally casues hair loss, I think the guy doing it caused it. For one thing like I said I did it not only every week I think I may even have done 2x a week in the beginning lmao. But also idk how its done on the scalp by actual hair clinics but here I was just using the same needle/syringe he uses going into shoulders, angles etc. So I think I already had issues with chronic inflammation (health) so just causing tons of inflammation to my scalp every week or even 2x a week just I thinkc aused too much trauma and inflammation & scar tissue. Its not that I think PRP done by a hair clinic will cause hair loss. I was losing my hair already for sure but it accelerated it IMO and it brought it to areas I didnt have it at the time. My new hair loss pattern is the exact pathing he did his injections on, like literally the exact path lol See honestly I care more now, when im 40-45 and married i dont care anymore. But now Im 32 and still single. When im having kids and married idgaf anymore tbh, just having some hair thats HT but not super full will be fine. I care a lot more now than I do whem im 45-50

I will get some pics of Donor area, both in person consults said I have at least 7000 grafts and they werent worried about my donor area. Though to answer your 1st question, I started finasteride after much not wanting to about 8 months ago, to be honest I think it made my thinning worse but I am not sure. I just recently switched to topical finasteride that has minoxidil in it, but thats only been about 1 week so no idea about that I dont have other good photos of donor area, I will get some, this photo is from about 1.5 years ago when I did my initial consults in December/Jan of 2020

EDIT: I made a much more comprehensive thread that has more photos and is more about me my situation and my goals rather than just "crown doctors" which will hopefully give much more info for people to be able to guide me and give advice, here is the thread. Hey everyone, I went through a series of mostly virtual consults back in the beginning of COVID and was pretty new and didnt ask too many intelligent questions and never really asked about expectations as I didnt really realize at the time the crown was the "black hole" and much harder to get good results. I am 32 and have a very different balding pattern than my dad & brother so Im not sure if mine is more health related or if thats common but my front hairline is fine and both in person consults I did have didnt worry about my front hairline for now at all. Ive attached three photos. I got quoted from 1500 grafts as the lowest from some surgeons to 2500 grafts from others as the highest quoted and that includes some in the mid scalp as that area is thinning. I think I actually screwed myself and I had a Dr I saw regularly for PRP on body parts injuries from sports. He said oh I do hair all the time do you want me to do your hair and said I get best results when I do it back to back in the starting, like every week or every other week. (big mistake) and I think almost all of my mid scalp thinning is due to this PRP I did. I had no mid scalp thinning until I did those PRP injections. ANyways, my dad did go pretty damn bald in the end and my brother is balding pretty hard (hes 36) so even though Ive got a pretty decent hair of head (actually nobody in my life really except for my immediate family even knows I am balding, I have enough hair left that fibers + dermatch when I go in water) has been enough, I do realize that later on in life I will likely need another surgery or two. So im not trying to just lob in 3000 grafts or something and screw my donor for later on. The only name Ive seen asscoaited with Crown work is Wong. Is there anybody else I should consider? I havent spoken with Wong yet. I did speak with Scott Alexander in Arizona who I also have heard is a top surgeon. I was actually leaning towards Dr. McGrath in Texas for a while and not going to knock them and maybe my result goals are simply unrealstic but they kinda just told me like yeah we suggest 2k grafts, maybe 2.5k when we see you in person but youre still gonna look thin on the crown just FYI. Thats when I started to look into it realized crown is considered the black hole and looking for surgeons known for the crown who are confident. I know nothing is a guarantee and that my health, my genetics and so many other factors play a role into how well the procedure goes. But I am looking to see who is known & going to be confident about their crown results.