Men: How To Fix Hair Loss At Home (Full Guide)

fighting hair loss your newsfeed is probably flooded with the latest ads about a cure a breakthrough or a product disrupting the hair growth industry these lasers don't wait until you lose more hair the grow number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement in this video we'll separate fact from fiction reveal what grows hair what doesn't and how to go about fixing hair loss from the comfort of your home we'll also follow a step-by-step framework assess treat and adjust your plan based on data not emotion and will order your best treatment options based off of something known

as evidence quality this is a tool that you can use to evaluate the scientific Merit behind any product on the market and even to predict if a product's study results will actually match your real world experience trying that pill that topical that supplement that device that shampoo you name it natural conventional it doesn't matter the framework that you are going to learn in this video can be used to contextualize anything that you're considering and help you make better treatment choices finally we will reveal some of the biggest pitfalls that we see people make when trying

to fix their hair and how you can avoid all of those mistakes putting treatments too early buying into these kinds of therapies setting expectations based on Reddit posts not clinical evidence and much much more I hope this video is the last that you ever have to watch to help out your hair I hope you get incredible results we've got a lot to cover so let's get started step number one assess your hair loss most men seeking treatment for hair loss will have something called androgenic alopecia also called male pattern hair loss now this kind of

hair loss is chronic and Progressive without treatment it tends to worsen it often starts as a little bit of Temple recession maybe a bald spot or maybe diffuse thinning across the entire top of the scalp but over a series of years it can advance until somebody is nearly or completely bald so how do you know if you have androgenic alopecia it's simple go to a doctor or a dermatologist get an official diagnosis that is the only way and that diagnosis is not only there to give you Clarity it's also there to help make you eligible

for androgenic Alopecia best-in-class treatments but when you go to this appointment please be careful yes a good dermatologist is going to give you a clear diagnosis but many will also try to sell you into a class of hair loss treatments called autologous therapies platelet rich plasma stem cells PRP plus a cell exosomes platelet rich fibrin these are just a few of the names that are getting thrown around these therapies are where a dermatologist will take part of your blood or tissue they'll centrifuge it or concentrate key components and then they'll inject those components back into

your scalp the truth is these procedures are cash cows for dermatologists they take mere minutes for them to perform they cost patients anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 per session and they need to be repeated multiple times per year to sustain results multiple I cannot stress this enough autologous therapies they have very poor data supporting their use for androgenic Alopecia of the studies that do exist they have shown no benefit over something called micr needling Micron needling costs $10 it works through similar mechanisms and can be done from the comfort of your home so what would

you rather do a $10 atome therapy or a $5 to $10,000 recurring investment for the same results I won't make that choice for you but for me it's obvious so go to your dermatologist for their expertise their diagnostic capacity their prescriptive power they're incredibly valuable but don't feel pressured to buy into these autologous therapies they are poorly supported they show no superiority over $10 devices and if you're smart about your approach you won't even need to spend $10,000 over the course of your lifetime fixing your hair we'll get into how to do that later in

this video now say you do not have access to a dermatologist or maybe you're even curious what you can do at home to test for androgenic Alopecia do this first ask yourself do you have a familial history of hair loss did you first notice hair loss after puberty are you losing hair in any of these patterns or predominantly at the temples or crown if any the answers is yes your odds of having endogenic alopecia just increased then next time you are in the shower wash your hair all the hairs that fall out into your hands

stick those against the wall suction them flat with the moisture of the water then line the hairs up does some hairs look thicker and some hairs look thinner if the answer is yes your odds of androgenic alopecia again just increased here is why androgenic alopecia is genetic So a family history is often present it's it's driven by androgens which means it's usually going to start after puberty when male hormones kick in and it often starts in a predictable pattern hairline recession a bald spot or thinning across the top of the scalp and finally it has

a defining characteristic hair follicle miniaturization this is when an affected hair sheds out and when a new hair comes in to replace the old one that new hair is a little bit thinner than the previous hair each time this hair shedding happens this process of miniaturization repeats and repeats and repeats until the affected hair is so thin and so wispy that it's lost pigment and it's barely visible at all so go do these atome tests go get a diagnosis if you have androgenic alopecia the rest of this video applies to you and your next step

is to start exploring your treatment options but first what causes hair loss different kinds of hair loss have different causes and thereby different treatments the best treatment tends to Target the root of the problem so what is at the root of androgenic alopecia here's what we know so far in the 1940s a researcher named Dr James Hamilton visited a prison and made a fascinating series of observations first men who were castrated before puberty they didn't lose hair later in life second men who were castrated as adults saw a stop in the progression of their hair

thinning and then third castrated men who had seen a stop in hair loss but then received injections of testosterone those men started losing hair again Hamilton's observations established the first causal links between male hair loss and male hormones after all castration reduces testosterone levels in men by up to 95% testosterone production revs up at the start of puberty no testosterone Spike at puberty no hair loss later in life so Hamilton concluded that the balding process must be in part due to male hormones called androgens 30 years later researchers in Guam and papa new guini unlocked

a second piece to the puzzle first they visited islands and discovered that clusters of men had a rare genetic mutation these men couldn't produce an enzyme called Type 25 Alpha reductase this enzyme converts testosterone into another hormone called type 2 5 Alpha dihydro testosterone or DHT these men they had no type 25 Alpha DHT they also had normal levels of test testosterone and as adults they also had full protection from male pattern hair loss this led researchers to shift their focus maybe it wasn't all male hormones but maybe just one that predominantly drove male hair

thinning DHT future research begin to bolster this hypothesis in Petri studies hair follicles exposed to DHT would undergo apoptosis or cell death and when a Type 25 Alpha DHT lowering drug was developed and then later tested on on men with androgenic alopecia it slowed stopped or partially reversed hair loss in 80 to 90% of them together these studies solidified a causal link between DHT and androgenic alipa if you fast forward to today we now know that androgenic alopecia is caused by interactions between our genes and male hormones predominantly DHT and that by lowering scalp levels

of DHT we actually have one of the most reliable ways to slow pause and even partially reverse the balding process now to be clear DHT isn't the only thing involved in androgenic alopecia researchers have also identified dozens of other factors inflammation microvascular insufficiency fibrosis and in some subsets of men immune disregulation what's more certain microorganisms seem to be found in up to 30 to 50% of balding scalps that in excess can cause inflammation this inflammation causes hair shedding which then accelerates the balding process because it creates more opportunities for hair follicle miniaturization again that's a

process that depends on hairs shedding out and regrowing in to go even further on this studies on genetically identical twins have shown that one twin can bald faster than his or her counterpart and that the twin with less hair generally will report making poorer dietary lifestyle and environmental choices and finally anything that disrupts our hair cycle be it seasonal hair sheddings severe stress rapid weight loss iron deficiencies selenium surpluses vitamin D deficiencies hypothyroidism certain medications you name it anything like that comes with the risk of causing more hair shedding which would enance androgenic alipa onset

so you hear about this and you think if you really want to stop hair loss maybe you need to identify all possible accelerators of hair loss in yourself and then go about systematically fixing each one of them not just for your hair but for your overall health right not so fast I cannot emphasize this enough do not miss the forest for the trees do not hyperfocus on resolving secondary factors in androgenic alopecia and in doing so neglect to pull on the biggest lever right before your eyes lowering DHT because yes studies show that normalizing immune

reactions or lowering scalp inflammation or improving microcirculation or eliminating pathogenic microorgan isms these can all regrow hair and yes if you have excessive hair shedding also known as teligent effluvium then if you clean up your diet your lifestyle your environment you can normalize that hair cycle in many cases reduce your rates of hair shedding and thereby slow down this rate of balding from an accelerated rate down to a normal Pace but a deeper look into the data paints a more muted story for the power of these secondary factors because those studies on genetically identical twins

they usually only show minor differences in hair loss across twin sets throughout a lifetime I mean yes there are outliers even still one of these studies found that just 8% of twin sets had slightly different levels of balding late into their life so diet lifestyle environment these things do impact hair loss and for some people it's absolutely true but for the average man with androgenic alopecia changing these things are most likely High effort low leverage treatment targets and those studies on calming the IM imun system lowering scalp inflammation improving microcirculation yes these types of treatment

targets can absolutely regrow hair as well but that hairy growth is often hit or miss some people will see a lot of it some people will see nothing at all and when you extend out the study durations that are targeting these secondary factors long-term data on these treatments it either doesn't exist or if it does it shows that the hairs that were gained in month three month four they start to Disappear by month 8 eight and that hair loss still will worsen over a series of years and this really brings us to our first big

treatment mistake one where people will overhaul their diets start sleeping eight hours a night and Target dozens of secondary contributors to androgenic alopecia only to slightly reduce their hair shedding or see minor minor improvements to hair growth when if they had just spent a fraction of that effort pulling on one lever lowering DHT they could have gotten a much better outcome because with that one lever you not only see higher treatment response rates and regrowth rates you tend to also see better data showing that your hair gains they're going to hold 2 five maybe even

10 years down the line so as you navigate all of your options please keep this in mind people will see success targeting secondary contributors to hair loss we see this all the time we highlight a lot of these cases on our site but the very best and most consistent outcomes come not from targeting secondary factors it comes from people targeting DHT or targeting DHT plus all of those other things alt together if you want to dive deeper into this we have two resources for you the first is an interactive guide that shows how hair loss

advances for both men and women end across the four major hair loss types at both a macro level and a micro level the second is a scientific guide to factors contributing to hair loss you will uncover the strongest Arguments for and against every single Factor no straw Manning this is to take away from the debates online and instead present to you the best arguments the best counterarguments and the best rebuttal of popular hair loss factors and theories so that you can better understand scientific consensus and the viability of targeting any single one of these factors

for your treatment outcomes I'm going to link both of those resources below check them out we spent a ton of time building them they're interactive they're educational they are 100% free I hope they help you out all right we have covered how to diagnose androgenic alopecia we've covered what causes it we've also covered some of its treatment targets now let's talk about your actual treatments and how to select them there are hundreds so which ones are right for you you can narrow down your options by basically using three key metrics number one what's the regrowth

viability our team developed a four-point scale to rank the regrowth potential of any treatment zero means they there's no data or no potential four means that there's the best potential this metric regrowth viability it accounts for two things first if a treatment targets a primary or a secondary factor in hair loss and then secondly how much regrowth can you expect to achieve based on the clinical data is the regrowth at a microscopic level or does it actually happen at a cosmetic level and just how much regrowth overall should we expect the second factor is evidence

quality this represents the clinical support for any treatment out there if a product is supported only by lower quality research so we're talking fewer papers poor designs smaller sample sizes or even author conflicts of interests the odds are a lot higher that those clinical study results will not align with your real world experience trying that specific product but if some intervention has higher quality studies behind it the higher the likelihood that those study results are actually going to match your real world experience evidence quality is our Guiding Light to all treatment recommendations you need to

understand it use it and if you do you are going to get far better outcomes and for an example of how we grade evidence quality on a 100 point scale check out our rubric I will link it below the third Factor what's the long-term viability this basically measures four things the recurring effort to do a treatment its recurring costs its long-term evidence and its safety low effort and low cost means a higher likelihood that you are going to stick with it in the long term but even if something is low effort and low cost if

there's no long-term data on the treatment or if the 24-month data exists and it shows that your results start to WAN and really aggressively you're probably going to lose motivation to keep going and then there's also this question of long-term safety for this video we have to keep the safety debate to just one single question is there long-term safety data available and is it will understood yes or no the reality is that treatment safety is too individualized to generalize to an entire audience and risk tolerances indications and contraindications they are unique to each person we

will eventually make Standalone videos about all the treatments discussed in this video we will dive deeper into their safety elements there for this video we are only going to discuss safety in that broad stroke environment does the data exist or does it not exist so let's recap if you want the best best chances of hair regrowth pick treatments with high regrowth viability High evidence quality and high long-term viability if just one of those metrics is off or low your odds of long-term success are going to dramatically decrease and that is not what we want so

let's start going through your treatment options the first is finast [Music] ride faside is an FDA approved medication for androgenic Alopecia it's currently considered the gold standard treatment for fighting androgenic alopecia in men and here is why first it targets a primary cause of hair loss it has been studied by dozens and dozens of research groups across hundreds of studies it has two five even 10year data establishing its efficacy for hair growth and 20 plus year data establishing its safety profile you can get a prescription for it for $30 a year and to use it

all you need to do is take a single pill every day for these reasons fastr has earned the best combination that we have to offer of regrowth viability evidence quality and long-term viability theide works by inhibiting Type 25 Alpha reductase the enzyme that converts free testosterone into DHT again the hormone that is causally linked to androgenic alopecia clinical studies show that one 1 milligram a day can reduce DHT Levels by about 60 to 70% and that is therapeutically low enough to slow stop or partially reverse hair loss in 80 to 90% of the men who

use it what's more 2-year studies show that the drug not only improves hair counts and hair densities it also increases hair weight by around 35% which is usually enough to produce very cosmetically significant degrees of hair regrowth at least for the average user now a lot of people that we work with will say I tried finasteride and it didn't work and we ask them how long they tried it and they'll say 3 months 6 months 10 months I cannot stress this enough that is not enough time to evaluate fd's full effects clinical studies show that

yes in the first 3 to 6 months faside can regrow hair albeit at a microscopic level but these results for the average person they typically don't turn cosmetic until much later in fact the biggest hair gains from finid they usually don't even happen in year 1 they happen between year 1 and year 2 to fully gauge the power of this medication studies show that you actually need to try it for at least 18 to 24 months not 3 not 6 not 10 and it's only after that 24mon period where results will tend to plateau and

then potentially begin to maintain next if you start faside do not worry if you experience more hair shedding 1 to 3 months later effective hair loss treat treat ments can trigger something called hair cycle synchronization and this is where a portion of people using these things they'll initially see a wave of hair shedding that precedes a wave of new hair growth the good news is that under treatment conditions when your hairs begin to shed instead of regrowing in as thinner in the next hair cycle instead the opposite happens they start to regrow in as thicker

and thicker this is the exact opposite progression of androgenic alopecia it's part of why this medication can take 2 years to fully produce its effects some hairs have to shed repeatedly and keep coming back a little bit larger a little bit larger a little bit larger so while hair regrowth from finasteride can look like this across hundreds of people at an individual level it can kind of look like this so don't worry about these temporary sheds they're almost always a sign of great regrowth to come finally if you try finasteride do not set your expectations

for hair growth based on this Reddit post or anything similar due to the nature of these forums Reddit will over index on faside response curve extremes you are far more likely to see somebody post terrible results on the drug and great results on the drug then you actually are to see somebody with an average response and this polarization obviously will create a skewed perception of what you should expect you'll also see stories of people conflating finasteride induced hair shedding as an acceleration of their own hair loss and this can give you a very skewed perception

of its efficacy so please avoid benchmarking to reddit's edge cases and instead set slow and steady expectations steer the course for at least 18 to 24 months before you fully vet its effects now all of this sounds great and with the way that I just framed things fide is seemingly a miracle drug I mean the clinical data strongly suggest that if finasteride were the only thing that you did right now to fix your hair loss you wouldn't need to do any other treatments you're basically done so why isn't everybody using it well as with all

drugs there can be side effects and with finasteride those side effects typically relate to a lowered libido or sexual dysfunction or brain fog or in rarer cases gynecomastia which is the growth of male breast tissue large scale studies on the drug they suggest that these side effects typically occur in fewer than 5% of men so that's a very positive sign but they still happen they still get side effects and some people cannot tolerate The Drug In fact a main reason why people don't start finast in the first place is because they fear the side effects

so for these individuals what can you do or what should you do well under these circumstances rather than try finasteride orally which is going to reduce DHT levels everywhere you can try to apply it topically which will better localize the Drug's effects just to the scalp studies suggest that topical finasteride is non-inferior to oral finasteride basically a way to describe that it's the same at least in the target areas that it's applied yes some of that topical is going to leak into your bloodstream and yes some of it will go systemic but at the right

doses topical finasteride tends to have a more muted effect on DHT suppression throughout the body and it also might reduce systemic exposure of the drug by maybe 100 to 200 fold that of the oral medication this probably confers with a reduction of side effects so what is the best dose for topical finasteride well the minimum viable dose the lowest amount shown in any clinical study to actually improve parameters of hair is 0.5% topical finasteride applied 2 ml daily that's just 0.1 mg of daily finasteride exposure and at that level the studies also suggest that you

can still get hair benefits while preserving your serum DHT and DHT levels elsewhere basically no company sells a dose this low but if you want to try that formulation on yourself we built a topical calculator that you can use to make whatever dilution of finasteride you want either by crushing pills or diluting down a pre- purchased topical this is again 100% free follow the links below and if you go down this route and preserving DHT levels elsewhere in the body is of very high importance to you you can even do blood tests for DHT before

and during your topical finasteride treatment and doing this is actually going to help you approximate the systemic absorption of your topical finasterid so you can use your DHT results as a barometer to titrate down your dose until you find the highest dose that you can tolerate while still localizing the drugs effects to the scalp for more information on this watch our video breakdown on topical finasteride we detail this entire process otherwise doses of 0.1% to 0.3% topical finasteride at ranges of a half ml up to 2 mlit daily still seem to confer some degree of

of drug localization a big decrease in that circulating drug exposure and thereby a presumed reduction in the risk of side effects nearly every tah Health business will sell doses in those ranges you've got a lot of options I am not going to make a brand recommendation so that's what you need to know about your highest leverage treatment option for androgenic Alopecia finasteride but what else is out there well at least on the FDA approved side of things there's one more treatment and it's called minoxidil [Music] [Music] minoxidil is another popular treatment for men and women

it doesn't Target a primary cause of hair loss so its regrowth viability is more limited than Finas ride but as a topical it's FDA approved it's available without a prescription and it's easy to use all you need to do is just apply it to your scalp each day it's also been studied by dozens of research teams it costs less than $100 per year to do and while studies suggest hair growth can peak in months 4 to8 and then start to WAN long-term data still show that your hair gains can remain above Baseline even 5 years

into using it for a lot of people what makes minoxidil so appealing is that it doesn't significantly affect male hormones whereas faside will lower DHT minoxidil won't instead it acts as a vasod dilator it promotes the fenestration of blood vessel NS in hair follicles it's basically just a fancy way of saying that it grows new blood vessel networks in balding regions and so guys who are apprehensive about finast they're often way more receptive to a drug like minoxidil because it doesn't Target male hormones to the same extent it's not linked to sexual side effects and

it still has a high degree of clinical support in fact the side effects of topical minoxidil are typically relegated to things like skin irritation and in Just 2 to 7% of users and in far fewer than 1% of cases you'll hear reports of heart fluttering and fatigue and these side effects are usually very manageable by just titrating down your dose so again sounds great why isn't everybody using topical minoxidil well despite not targeting DHT despite lots of clinical support topical minoxidil is just not that effective at least for the average person in fact studies show

that 40 to 60% of people trying topical minoxidil they don't even experience any new hair growth other Studies have found that up to 95% of topical minoxidil users quit within their first year of use with 2/3 of them citing no effect as their reason for quitting so why is that the problem is twofold first only a fraction of topical minoxidil is ever going to penetrate the outermost layers of your scalp skin so very little of the actual drug reaches the hair follicles where they can have an effect the second issue is that topical minoxidil has

an activation problem what I mean by that is that topical minoxidil is applied to the scalp as what's called a pro drug what that means is it's delivered inactively to the skin topical minoxidil it has to come into contact with an enzyme called sulfotransferase and that enzyme will sulfate mon oxidil turn it into its active form and then allow minoxidil to bind to the hair follicle sites where it can finally have an effect unfortunately 40 to 60% of people who are losing their hair they don't have enough activity of this enzyme in their scalp to

activate minoxidil and thereby let it get to work let it start regrowing hair and that means they don't see an effect and they eventually quit using the drug fortunately both of these problems the penetration issue and the activation issue are fixable here's exactly how you go about doing it first start with 5% minoxidil and apply 2 milliliters daily after 6 months if you're not seeing improvements escalate your protocol get a prescription that compounds topical minoxidil with retino I acid studies show that this ingredient not only enhances the penetration of minoxidil but it also activates more

of that enzyme sulfotransferase inside the skin and if you want to take this a step further add in Micron needling adding in Micron needling the wounds will enhance drug penetration they'll also activate more minoxidil and maybe influence minoxidil impact on certain signaling Pathways related to hair growth and if you want to learn more about that check out our video diving into the literature review that we published on micr needling the bottom line is that with just these two add-ons retinoic acid and Micron needling you can potentially enhance minoxidil efficacy by maybe two or threefold and

if you want to take this treatment combination even further you can start upping your dose of topical minoxidil you go from 5% to 7% 10 even 15% there are a lot of companies that will sell these formulations so check with your doctor check with T Health Brands near your area finally if you want to take this another step forward consider going from topical minoxidil to oral minoxidil when minoxidil is swallowed it's metabolized in the liver where there's an abundance of sulfotransferase activity this turns nearly all of that minoxidil into minoxidil sulfate and then it sends

it into the bloodstream in its active form where gets distributed across a bunch of other tissue sites including the scalp skin and that's why studies will show such high response rates and regrowth rates for oral minoxidil pound for pound it's a very impressive drug preliminary data also show that oral minoxidil is probably a little bit more effective than topical minoxidil and that the regrowth that you get it's dose dependent so you're going to get bigger hair gains by upping from 1 milligram to 2 milligram to even 5 milligrams daily depending on your tolerability the side

effect profile does change with oral minoxidil but at least so far the data show that doses of maybe 2 and 1 12 milligram daily and lower over 6mon study periods they appear relatively safe we're going to make more videos about this topic in the future so those are your FDA approved options finasteride and minoxidil and again if you only use these things odds are that you're going to get great regrowth and you will not need anything else for your hair for the rest of your life so what about natural interventions do natural treatments have any

clinical support the answer is yes and with some caveats the first is that studies exploring natural interventions they tend to be of lower quality so they're often underpowered or they're lacking control groups or they're lacking randomization or they don't have adequate blinding and if just one of those little variables is missing you can actually manipulate a study to get any result that you want I'm not kidding when I say that I mean we made a video about this we gave dozens of examples of real companies real hair care brands that engage in those types of

tactics and just how prevalent that practice is so check it out the other issue is that studies on natural treatment ments they typically run shorter so 6 months we often have no idea what will happen at month 12 or month 24 does the regrowth sustain does it wne in the case of minoxidil I mean we just don't know and when we don't know it's actually kind of dangerous to start assuming outcomes and then the final issue is safety when I was younger my default assumption was if something is natural it probably is safe and over

time I have realized that this is not always correct fish oil supplements were originally heralded as heart healthy now we know they might increase atrial fibrillation antioxidants were once thought to extend lifespan now we know they probably do very little and they might even shorten it betacarotene was once thought to be cancer protective now we know it actually increases lung cancer in smokers and vitamin E and selenium these were once thought to protect against prostate cancer until a 35,00 000 person study on those supplements was actually halted because subsets of men were getting twice the

rates of prostate cancer in the supplement group my point is that substances of all categories pharmaceutical and natural they can show good safety signals in initial studies only for longer term data to reveal big problems in year 2 year five year 10 and that's really problematic especially in today's marketplace where some of the biggest names in health and wellness the people millions are turning to for guidance they're also promoting supplements topicals and devices that have no controlled long-term safety data because if history tells us anything too many of the market fads from 10 20 years

ago later turned out to either do nothing or do harm again this concern applies just as much to Natural Products as it does Pharmaceuticals and believe me I am fully aware of the psychopathy of drug companies I mean how awful is it that MC the same company that made faside also made the arthritis drug viox a medication that ended up causing 100,000 heart attacks and killing 55,000 people now mistakes happen except that probably wasn't a mistake because litigation revealed that MC knew about that safety concern from their initial trials and rather than halt drug development

they chose to change their trial designs delete heart attacks from the data sets and then present obfuscated findings to the FDA in order to get drug approval so rather than accept a financial loss MC chose I guess what they considered the better path forward killing 55,000 people make no mistake pharmaceutical companies have been finded billions of dollars for committing fraud cheating clinical trials burying bad data lying to Regulators giving Kickbacks to doctors to write prescriptions the only ones to blame for their PR problems right now and they lacking public trust are themselves because viox is

not a one-off story it's one of dozens of examples where they just got caught so it's no wonder why people hear about these things they write off Pharmaceuticals altogether and we end up with this tribalism online of all natural versus all conventional not just over hair loss but over any health topic on the planet I mean it bothers me when people firmly rooted in both camps cannot summarize the strongest arguments of why somebody else is in the opposition I mean many natural enthusiasts have a massive distrust of pharmaceuticals because those companies have a massive history

of untrustworthy Behavior likewise many people taking hair growth drugs actually first started with the allnatural approach and they saw no success at all and the drugs were the only things that saved their hair and today we are in this environment where almost no one seems capable of recognizing the other side's perspective so nobody's crossing any picket lines to say I get where you're coming from and in my opinion this is unhealthy and it needs to stop so I would like to challenge those watching this video to entertain the possibility that two seemingly contradictory things can

actually both be true it can be true that natural enthusiasts avoid drugs for very valid reasons and in doing so they buy into supplements and extracts that are less studied and might actually carry the same exact risks it can be true that drug companies bury bad data and design biased clinical trials in an effort to maximize profits as do dozens of natural companies who use stories like Vio to prey on your distrust of conventional medicine it can be true that pharmaceutical shills and snake oil salesmen are at their core the same two people they're just

plating to different consumer groups and it can be true that MC developed a drug that killed 55,000 people and they also developed a drug that became the best-in-class gold standard treatment for hair loss in men finasterid results have been replicated across dozens of research teams even after finasterid patent expired and even without conflicts of interests and it can also be true that faside is not the perfect drug for everyone this all reveals a very jarring and very painful reality that you will need to make decisions about your health your hair based on imperfect information this

is true for natural treatments this is true for conventional treatments so as long as you're aware of all of this and you choose to go down One path like the natural path all that I ask is that you put a plan in place if you start natural remedies and you see results in 6 Months 8 months amazing this can happen we see it all the time inside of our site and if this is your experience then a huge congratulations are in order keep doing what you were doing we hope that your results last a lifetime

but if after 6 months 10 months 12 months you are not seeing improvements or maybe your hair is getting worse consider escalating your protocol to involve better supported interventions we don't want you to get into this mentality trap of trying the same supplements topicals laser combs for years watching your hair get worse but always thinking maybe I just need more time for results we made a video on this topic Check It Out Below now with all that Preamble out of the way let us dive into some natural interventions that according to our team's research have

the highest levels of clinical support across natural treatments the first is micr needling this entails deliberate wounding of the scalp with medical grade needles usually once every 1 to 3 weeks some Studies have found that non-responders of finasteride and minoxidil if you add in Micron needling you can unlock new levels of hair hairy growth other Studies have found that Micron needling enhances both the penetration and the activation of minoxidil and combining both of these treatments can in some studies lead up to 400% better hair regrowth versus minoxidil alone and a handful of Studies have shown

that Micron needling by itself actually might also promote hair growth while the mechanisms aren't clear it's probably because the wounds from Micron needling elicit growth factors and proteins that help initiate new hair Cycles these wounds also promote angiogenesis they can reduce scarring so these devices may actually Target several of those secondary factors involved in the balding process and by the way that mechanism acute wounding is basically the same mechanism as platelet rich plasma therapy two clinical Studies have shown that Micron needling is basically as effective as PRP so if you want to leverage that mechanism

at home for your hair and without paying thousands of dollars micro needling in my opinion has a clear advantage in both its costs and its benefits now keep in mind that Micron needle in research is also in its infancy nearly all Micron needling studies they've run just 6 months what happens at month 12 what happens at month 36 we don't yet know what we do know is that Micron needling probably enhances the penetration of most topical and it might stimulate aspects of hair growth on its own if you want to learn more about this topic

again we published a systematic literature review about micr needling and its use in hair loss we broke down all of our findings in a video I will link that video below okay so what other natural options are there hundreds really I mean you've got different supplements topicals compounds devices some have way better data than others rather than cover all of them we're going to Rapid Fire the ingredients that we found rank highest on the hierarchy of evidence again that is our guiding tool it's our barometer that we can use to predict if clinical study results

are going to match our real world outcomes when we try these things these natural ingredients in include oral plus topical saw paletto topical melatonin topical stoxen topical renil Capel and procapil topical caffeine topical adenosine topical rosemary oil an oral and topical lcarnitine L tartrate now my opinion is if you're already using things like finasteride or minoxidil these natural add-ons are going to be lower leverage than if you weren't using the drugs but if you're not using finasteride if you're not using minoxidil I think that the ingredients above as both a supplement and a topical these

do have some chance of helping you and it's probably best to combine as many of those ingredients as possible to increase your odds of success if you're curious we have steps on how to Source these ingredients how to dilute them properly how to combine them into your own topical your own supplement inside of our membership site so that you can avoid paying hundreds of dollars a month on branded products and instead just do this yourself have the lab test to show that what you're buying is actually what's inside the ingredients and then bring your cost

down to something like $17 a month but you can also just do this exercise for yourself because we've provided the doses in this video we've provided the evidence quality we've provided everything else so please feel free to check out those slides and if you want to take this one step further consider combining all of these things with micr needling so that you're multi-targeting your hair loss from as many angles as possible again in 6 to 8 months if this is not wor working for you consider escalating your protocol all right so that covers pharmaceutical and

natural treatments that in our comb of the literature show the highest levels of clinical support but what if you are taking finasteride what if you're taking minoxidil and you want to get even better results you've actually got a lot of options here let's discuss some of the highest leverage ones at your disposal first consider doubling down on your five Alpha reductase inhibition again that's the way that finasteride lowers DHT the general idea here is that the lower you can get five alha reductase the lower your DHT the better your hair gains and one way to

do this is just to switch from oral finasteride to oral dutasteride dutasteride is another five Alpha reductase inhibitor but it actually targets two isoforms of that enzyme type one and type two whereas finasteride mainly just targets type two clinical studies showed that a half milligram daily of oral dutasteride it can lower DHT by around 90% And that that actually confers with far better hair growth outcomes than finasteride and surprisingly that drug dutasteride it also confers a similar safety profile for sexual side effects so just see these studies showing similar incidences of sexual side effects across

both finasteride and dutasteride but way better hair growth outcomes for dastrid versus faside over 6 months in fact daily doses as low as 0.1 Mill Mig of dutasteride perform as well as 5 Mig of finasteride and doses of a half milligram to 2 and2 Mig daily of dutasteride show Superior results than 5 Mig of finasteride perhaps maybe by 30% 40% more hair growth so for guys who are already tolerating finasteride and not getting great results bumping up to dutasteride is often a great thing to consider because odds are you're going to tolerate it just fine

yet you've got more upside and if for any reason these higher oral dutasteride doses scare you like that 2 and half milligram dose you can always take a hybrid approach try oral dutasteride at .1 to.5 Mig daily then apply topical dutasteride a few times per week this might help minimize systemic exposure to the drug better concentrate the Drug's effects to the scalp and get you better hair growth outcomes all right so what else is there well to reiterate from earlier lowering DHT through five Alpha reductase inhibition it confers a ser series of advantages one is

that doing so allows our bodies to preserve our production of other androgens like testosterone but targeting five Alpha reductase that's not the only way to lower androgens or male hormones in the scalp another way is to antagonize Androgen receptors think of Androgen receptors as the cell's landing pads for male hormones basically the place where testosterone and DHT attached to a cell site and once they're attached those hormones can elicit effects on the cell's Behavior so whereas finasteride and dutasteride they inhibit the enzyme that makes DHT Androgen receptor antagonization it stops the male hormones that are

formed from ever attaching to the cell sites in the first place and if those hormones cannot land they have a much harder time influencing that cell's Behavior there are a bunch of ways that you can Target Androgen receptors you can encourage your cells not to form them in the first place you can make drugs that bind to those Androgen receptors before DH h t and testosterone can get there you can even degrade Androgen receptors that have already formed in all scenarios you're going to be reducing the amount of male hormones reaching the cell and in

the scalp not just DHT but also testosterone and for hair loss sufferers introducing this new mechanism can lead to pretty substantial hair gains the problem is for men many Androgen receptor antagonists are just not safe to use yes many women can take oral Androgen receptor antagonists and without issue but if you a male and you take an androgen receptor antagonist orally you are also going to crash your testosterone levels potentially to castration levels and you'll end up developing female likee characteristics and this is why oral Androgen receptor antagonists they're actually part of the therapies that

are offered to men who are transitioning they're that powerful with that said men can use localized Androgen receptor antagonists and some topical drugs were actually formulated for this exact purpose a few of them have even been studied for androgenic Alopecia and they've shown some success I'm not going to get into the specifics of each topical I'm about to list we have guides on all of them inside of our site just know that many of these are experimental there isn't a whole lot of data published on them and so using these things are going to come

with some uncertainties some unknown risks nonetheless if you are interested in trying a topical Androgen receptor antagonists as an add-on to your current treatment base here are a few that you can investigate topical flil this is a popular product in the Czech Republic but it's lesser known in places like the US topical kodone or cb31 this is an anti-androgen drug originally approved by the FDA for acne but it was later reformulated and tested for androgenic Alopecia so far with encouraging results topical spirolactone daily creams of 1 to 5% were recently shown to improve androgenic alopecia

in both men and women moreover topical dosing studies on spirolactone suggest that this drug it actually has a really hard time penetrating beyond the skin one study even showed that no changes to the blood hormones of men were observed after they had lathered 5% cream over 55% of their entire body for multiple days now in my eyes these aren't necessarily the concerning Androgen receptor antagonists out of all the ones to try I think these rank lower on the risk Spectrum but there are other popular topicals that in my opinion are available and they come with

a lot more risk ru58841 is one of them this was a research chemical developed in the 1990s all signs suggested it works really well partly because the anecdotes of people who have tried Ru consistently demonstrate great regrowth the problem is that this research chemical was literally abandoned by its own inventors with follow-up studies showing some of our used met metabolites having unintended anti-androgenic effects and despite two clinical studies alleging great hair growth on ru58841 these studies were never published and nobody knows the truth about why for a company that invested $10 million into making this

drug in my opinion the only reason why they would spend tens or hundreds of thousand dollars more to run clinical studies but then stop short a few extra thousand that costs to publish them is that there's probably something in the data that they don't want people to see there are also drugs in development such as piramide which is entering later stage clinical trials as those trials progress we will update everybody with more information in the meantime my personal opinion is I don't recommend people to go buy pomide for research purposes as there is no long-term

safety data and with things of that nature my opinion is it's best to air on the side of caution so what about scalp inflammation well as we mentioned earlier not all androgenic alopecia cases are exactly the same some present with low levels of scalp inflammation others present with moderate to severe levels of scalp inflammation moreover some research suggests that men with scalp inflammation they tend to respond worse to hair loss topicals like minoxidil all of this suggests that if we want to fight hair loss adequately resolving scalp inflammation is probably a critical component to that

so what's a major cause of this inflammation one possibility is microorganisms preliminary evidence shows that up to 30 to 50% of people with androgenic alopecia have pathogenic microorganisms in their scalps things that might be driving up inflammation and thereby our rates of hair shedding these microorganisms will feed off debris and sebum from our scalps then as a byproduct of that they'll produce something called porins these porins will react with UV light from sunshine and then they'll react to trigger inflammation in the scalp which then causes more shedding which then tricks the body into sending more

sebum to the sights to resolve that inflammation when in reality that sebum ends up reinforcing the life cycle and the feed of the microorganisms in the first place we wrote about this feedback loop in one of our earlier papers but given that scalp inflammation can be a blocker to hair regrowth and given that 30 to 50% of guys with androgenic alopecia probably have these microorganisms associated with the inflammation what can we do to Target this one really easy option is ketoconazol shampoo ketoconazol is a medicated shampoo it has antifungal and anti-inflammatory properties it might even

help to mildly reduce DHT levels more than five clinical Studies have shown that ketoconazol shampoo can improve pattern hair loss outcomes and specifically for people who have symptoms of these microorganisms we're talking symptoms like excessive scalp oiliness excessive dandruff even seic der atitis if you have these problems your likelihood of having these microorganisms increases and if that's you you actually might want to add 2% ketoconazol shampoo two to four times per week to your hair growth stack this is going to help to kill off those microorganisms lower your scalp inflammation reduce your rates of shedding

and hopefully improve your overall hair growth outcomes and as these microorganisms die off you can actually reduce your shampooing frequency with keto kazol to Once weekly or once every other week or even once monthly so it doesn't have to be this permanent thing now ketoconazol shampoo isn't for everyone for instance if you have little to no scalp inflammation and you have no excessive oiliness there's a chance that you're going to use it and it's going to dry your scalp out and leave your hair feeling really brittle but if you do have inflammation associated with these

microorganisms or symptoms of it this treatment it's a low effort medium leverage option and should really help to improve your outcomes overall if you want learn more information about it check out our video on ketoconazol shampoo it's also called nerol so this concludes some of the best and most effective ways to fight androgenic alopecia in men and with that we also wanted to add a few FAQs that will undoubtedly come up in this video why didn't we include laser therapies well let's chart it out laser therapies are cost prohibitive they lack long-term data in many

studies on these devices they tend to show big differences between hair count improvements at a microscopic level which are high and then participant satisfaction scores which are low this opens up a possibility of what we would call biased hair counting methodologies like for example grouping together terminal and vus hairs to reach statistical significance finally a lot of laser therapy studies they seem to start start in periods entering seasonal hair shedding and seasonal hair shedding is driven in part by changes to light exposure from the Sun laser therapies work through wavelengths of light that share overlap

with the sun and I actually think that there might be some significant bias in the way that many of these trials were initially conducted and set up and that the devices they actually might only normalize hair shedding rather than regrow lots of hair for more information on this check out our video guide on telen alium WE dive into that and other examples of this in more detail why didn't you mention scalp massages well let's chart it out yes there is preliminary evidence that scalp massages might do something for people with hair loss and it's also

a free intervention but the data supporting scalp massages has always ranked very low on evidence quality I've always been open to this the massages also take a lot of work to do so if you look at adherence over a series of years it tends to be pretty low these factors make this intervention fun to experiment with for a lot of people and some of them have seen great success but it also makes it impossible to adhere to in the long run for the average person if you want to learn more about this in 2019 our

team published a study on scalp massaging which you can access entirely for free I'm going to include the links to the demonstration video the PDF instructions and the cross-sectional survey results that we reported as well as some before and after photos from people using Scout massages both as a standalone experiment and alongside other treatment options but keep in mind that these anecdotes a lot of them are impressive but they're not enough by itself to change these metrics that evidence quality score of this nature means that there's going to be a lot of variability between clinical

results and real world experiences some people are going to report success other people will report nothing at all and that's typically the pattern that you are going to anticipate with intervention ions of that level at that hierarchy of evidence which is why we prioritize other treatments and I just want you to know that when making your treatment choices so that you can discern between the anecdotes that you see online and then the real clinical data supporting an intervention much like we wouldn't want to Benchmark to those Reddit posts showing faster rid's best responders we don't

want to do the same with any natural intervention and those anecdotes run the risk of creating that presentation bias which is again why we want you to have all of this information understand those three metrics that are so important to gauge treatment success off of so that you are fully informed when making these choices okay final thoughts you have your top tiered FDA approved treatment options you have your escalation schedules to get better results you know for all your treatment options how long you need to wait in order to see good regrowth and you also

have options for the natural path if you choose to go down that road hopefully this gives you a very clear path path forward treating your hair loss does not need to cost you a lot of money nor does it need to occupy much of your time your energy your effort I hope that you were able to use this video to make more informed choices prioritize treatments that work get behind the best supported interventions for your treatment preferences and get the best results possible we are going to make a video just like this for women in

the near future I look forward to everybody's results I wish you the best of luck thank you for watching I will see you next time