Morphollica.com Editor’s Corner
Musings and rants on hair loss by the editor of Morphollica.com

Useless treatments

Posted on Sunday 25 January 2004

If the results returned by most Internet searches on the topic of hair loss are to be taken at face value, we would all be rubbing tons of useless ointments and concoctions all over our heads. There is even a site that espouses doing facial contortions and moving your ears to regrow your hair. There are sites that try to convince you that “ancient chinese herbs” will regrow your hair, or that ayurvedic techniques will do the trick. One cannot say for certain that these things don’t work, but it appears to me that there is not one shred of scientific evidence that these products and techniques do anything to regrow hair.

One technique that some scam hair loss treatments use to trick people is to use their own knowledge against them. They start by telling you what you already know about hair loss — namely, that DHT is thought to be the trigger, and that genes may be involved and so forth. Once they massage you into trusting them with a page or two of facts, they then jump to unsubstantiated conclusions to get you to cough up your cash. Just realize this: the hair loss treatment industry is a multi-billion dollar industry! It’s a cash cow. Don’t trust the peddlars of unproven wares. You should limit yourself to what’s known to work, or at the very least what has been scientifically proven to inhibit DHT while being safe (like essential fatty acids, ALA, GLA, LA, etc.) or get quality transplants only after doing a lot of research. But this should be a LAST resort that you go to only after having tried to treat your hair loss with minoxidil, finasteride, and potentially a small handful of other treatments.

Sorry to rain on the parade. This is not to say that I don’t think other things may work. I think we will have products that work way better than our current treatments eventually. Some of the unproven treatments may even have some merit, but you’re basically rolling the dice with them. And some of them may even be harmful.

And with follicular neogenesis in the works, within the next 5 years to 20 years, we will have an abundant supply of hair for transplantation (or in this case implantation).

Don’t get tricked into coughing up a ton of cash for worthless treatments.


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