hairmonk

Exactly, I've recently used it on a small scar revision on my stomach. No permission needed, just cooperation from a doctor and they like money too If it's healed well in a year my plan is to use the before and after pictures to convince a transplant surgeon to let me use it with a FUE

It's not misleading, we just disagree. I don't think your small wound model aligns well with how verteporfin seems to work in the animal or in vitro mechanism studies. Verteporfin suppresses the signalling caused by tension in large wounds, reducing scar tissue formation and leading to healthy tissue regeneration instead. So without creating the large wounds that causes this tension in the first place, what's verteporfin supposed to be doing that regenerates tissue in a way that already can't happen with microneedling alone? Nobody's laughing, run your experiment with smaller wounds or keep trying to convince others. Changing your experiment to use microcoring would be more interesting. The risk I brought up was more about what doctors are comfortable with in a medical setting. If your fix for this is to reduce the invasiveness of the wound being created or to change venue to somewhere less strict, you're already losing a lot of what makes verteporfin exciting. People microneedling and applying it at home wouldn't have gotten us to this point.

There's a world of difference between: 1. testing verteporfin in a low visibility area of the skin where a scar would have formed anyway to see if it can reduce scarring in that patient or narrow down a protocol that may do so for others in the future 2. deliberately creating large wounds in more visible areas of the skin that will likely result in scarring, even if verteporfin works to some degree One is pure harm reduction where you can freely experiment with the protocol, the other introduces harm. One of my takeaways from this thread is that there's very little doctor or patient interest in the useful version of this experiment until the evidence gets better. Even the Qazi acne trial seems to be having trouble recruiting which should be a slam dunk. More people trying it at home probably won't change this, but they're welcome to try. We should all be very grateful to the doctors who have taken on bootstrapping it

Additional evidence needs to keep trickling in to get more doctors interested, there's really nothing for them to say publicly unless they want to be early like the doctors trying it now. The Qazi acne trials will help, the original researchers publishing more will help, donating the equipment for objective hair counts in newer hair transplants will help. Increased conviction in the doctors using it now will help. Until then this probably just looks like another ACell, backed only by subjective case reports and animal studies. The best thing the thread could do is stay focused on the promise of Verteporfin without bringing up premature alternate experiments like microneedling and lasers in recipient areas.

The downside is so far you need to create enough trauma to lead to scar tissue, so it's a little unethical to run that experiment in recipient areas under controlled conditions. And recipient areas are highly visible, that's why we want to move hair there in the first place. It's why some scar healing trials in the past have used less visible areas like behind the knee to create wounds. Most doctors won't risk this type of experiment until there are more successful cases, and maybe the acne trials can answer this safety question. The advantage using hair transplant donor areas is that the surgeries were already happening, scars in the donor region are the default outcome and Verteporfin on extraction wounds is unlikely to make them worse.