Cal, if you’ve grown hair from dermabrading your scalp in the past, why don’t you continue to dermabrade it so you can grow more hair?
If you have been reading anything I say on this thread then you already know the answer to that.
You say we can get the wounding effects, and more reliably, with growth factors. But we can’t.
You’ve said a lot of things about a lot of issues relating to wounding here on the forum, but I don’t remember you ever explaining clearly and concisely why you haven’t tried more dermabrasion.
Repeatedly wounding the same spot of skin for a few scattered hairs is not a viable MPB plan.
You could safely re-dermabrade the same spot perhaps once a year at best. And in the long term that is already pushing it a lot more than I would care to.
All for what? Maybe 0.25 hairs per square centimeter each time? 0.50 hairs? Even 1 hair per centimeter (which is too optimistic) is a slow-ass process. It’s not going to cosmetically reverse MPB in this lifetime.
Even if I wanted to go that route it wouldn’t look right for a long time. It would spend decades looking more like a crappy HT than a natural reversal of the MPB process. Walking around with a raw sore head, and a bunch of random hairs sticking out of the area?
Remember that wound-caused new hairs are not the kinds of hairs/coverage you get from the Big-3 medications. The meds give natural results that look like the MPB process backing up a few years. Medication-boosted hairs start coming into a balded area looking thin & wispy & full density. But the hairs you get from wounding/needling are more like donor-wreath-density hairs, appearing very sparsely on otherwise shiny-bald skin.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Repeatedly wounding the same spot of skin for a few scattered hairs is not a viable MPB plan.
You could safely re-dermabrade the same spot perhaps once a year at best. And in the long term that is already pushing it a lot more than I would care to.
All for what? Maybe 0.25 hairs per square centimeter each time? 0.50 hairs? Even 1 hair per centimeter (which is too optimistic) is a slow-ass process. It’s not going to cosmetically reverse MPB in this lifetime. [/quote]
Great, explanation, cal… and I agree with you there 100%. Although I have to wonder if you’re reading my entire posts, because I was saying basically the EXACT SAME THING. Repeated dermabrasion of the same spot of skin is NOT a viable plan, in fact it will eventually damage the tissue and REDUCE the viability of the follicles there, not increase it.
What’s left, then? A single-session, one-off treatment? That’s not likely to work either, because we know that one-time dermabrasion produces very little hair, and whatever hair it does produce is not ensured – it varies wildly from person to person.
Therefore a one-time dermabrasion doesn’t represent a reliable enough or consistent enough treatment for anyone to sell to investors or the general public, as the basis of a marketable MPB treatment. (This part goes without saying – in fact, there is nothing to “sell” in the first place, because if one-time dermabrasions were widely known to grow cosmetically positive amounts of hair on bald scalps, millions of people would be getting this done this every year.)
That leaves only one other possibility – joining a one-time dermabrasion treatment with some as-yet unknown chemical or drug which will dramatically augment the effect of the dermabrasion. But how long has Follica had to come up with that? They have been beating the same horse for over 10 years.
I can also see that if such a drug/chemical is ever found, the value will be in that drug or chemical itself… in other words, the value-added of the dermabrasion part will be minimal if not negligible.
So they would still be left at square one with the wounding idea. It risks damaging the scalp as a repeated treatment, is not effective or reliable enough as a stand-alone treatment, and the likelihood of it being a key part of some combination treatment, joined with a drug, is low because any really effective drug will probably realize its effectiveness based on its own merits, not because of the dermabrasion.
Yes, we agree that there is no existing practical way to use wounding to treat MPB.
I think we just disagree on where wounding ranks in the hierarchy of things to explore further. IMO it still looks as promising as anything else that has been investigated.
Wounding/medication stuff has frustrated us with a lack of incremental progress. But looking at the big picture, it remains the only method that has shown ANY evidence that it can reach the goal. Adding up all the companies, we have seen probably 200+ million dollars and 15+ years of R&D dumped into various cellular-type methods. We know more than we did about the problem. But what do we have to show for it? We still cannot even treat this problem in a lab setting, never mind the commercial sense.
In a nutshell:
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Show me any example of a nice thick pre-MPB hair shaft returning to long-balded skin on a human (without using sex-change levels of hormone manipulation). I will probably show you a wound-based situation.
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We do not understand this, nor can we replicate it in a lab setting.
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Therefore, I call the HM world collectively idiotic. They are collectively dumping most of their R&D into other things that have yet to show any capability of regrowing practical terminal hairs at all.
It’s been 15+ years and probably 200+ million dollars sunk into cell-based HM research, and they still cannot even do what wounding has done BY ACCIDENT.
OK, I understand, but I think you and many other people have magnified the potential of wounding far beyond what it really deserves. Here’s why I think that has happened:
People give selective attention to things that seem “new” and “different”. All of us have seen an endless stream of chemicals, topicals, lotions, solutions, drugs, and research into molecules that could be dissolved and injected into the scalp… and time and time again, we’ve been disappointed by these things. They include everything from pharmaceuticals that have been FDA approved and on the market for a long time (Minoxidil/Rogaine, and Finasteride), along with snake oil cures, home-brew mixes, hybrid mixes of legal snake oils and home-concocted regimens (palmetto oil, zinc, copper, allergy medications, antifungals, cayenne pepper, tapioca pudding, dog manure, etc.)… and time and again, these things may grow some hair here or there, but they never produce consistent, spectacular results. Cosmetically impressive hair growth – with all these products – legal and illegal, FDA-approved and unapproved, black market and readily available – is ALWAYS both rare and anecdotal.
I think that has caused a lot of people to have an inherent bias against drugs, chemicals and topicals – and they’re RIGHT.
I should note, though, when you hold up wounding against everything else, and say only wounding has shown miraculous hair growth of terminal follicles sprouting out of nowhere – that is just not true at all.
Many of the treatments I listed above, and many more, have shown anecdotal results of pretty amazing hair growth. Think of:
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Kevin Nguyen, who posted on YouTube and came here to HairSite a few years ago and showed amazing results, going from practically a Norwood 4-5 all the way back to Norwood 0, from just using a combination of Rogaine and a few other things. I totally believe his story – it is spectacularly impressive. The problem is, and what is not sinking in for a lot of people, is that hair regrowth is incredibly idiosyncratic. Kevin Nguyen is the outlier of outliers. What works in a few outliers will not work in the vast, vast majority of people – and that includes wounding.
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All the thousands of people who have actually restored significant amounts of hair using only Rogaine, or only Finasteride or Dutasteride, or other anti-androgens (look at the story Jarjarbinx has told often here, about how he regrew almost all of his own hair about 10+ years ago using a certain high-potency (but unapproved) anti-androgen he purchased on the internet – RU 5886 (or whatever). And then he lost all that hair again, because he was no longer able to purchase a reliable supply of the agent.
The fact is, these anecdotal stories happen ALL THE TIME (relatively speaking) with many drugs and chemicals, because everyone’s physiology is different, everyone’s follicles are a little bit different, and everyone’s hair loss is a little bit different. There are ALWAYS outliers who get amazing results. But the reason people don’t go apesh*t about any of this is we all know that people respond differently and most people don’t get spectacular results. We already know this has been reported thousands of times throughout the news media and the scientific press, so we don’t latch on to any of these products and get obsessed over them.
SO, when something that seems truly new and “different” comes along – like wounding – many people can display selective attention. They believe what they want to believe – that because a treatment or idea is qualitatively “different” from everything else – mechanical stimulation and perturbation of the SKIN instead of just slathering on another chemical or popping another pill – they get fixated on the novelty of it.
It’s actually a psychological reaction at work here. Something that seems “new and shiny” to us provokes a subconcious bias in favor of it – it’s the novelty effect. We have selective attention for what seems really new and different.
The problem is, wounding – at the cellular and biochemical level – is really no different at all from adding a topical or injecting a bunch of chemicals and growth factors like Histogen’s HSC. NO DIFFERENT AT ALL, because what the f*dk do you think wounding actually does in the skin? What it does is stimulate the cells to release – THE EXACT SAME LIST OF GROWTH FACTORS YOU GET FROM SOMETHING LIKE HISTOGEN’S HSC.
So wounding is, at the cellular and biochemical level, NO DIFFERENT FROM ADDING OR INJECTING CHEMICALS TO THE SKIN. It’s the same exact g^dddam thing as Histogen does.
Let me put that in as clear terms as possible:
WOUNDING = CHEMICALS
And I don’t mean, by that, something like “wounding is just as good as adding chemicals”. I literally mean, wounding is the exact same thing, physiologically, as putting chemicals into your skin. Wounding is growth factors. Wounding is chemicals.
Nothing wrong with that, of course – but don’t expect it to have any different qualitative or quantitative effects on hair growth.
And Histogen actually does it more reliably, because with Histogen you know exactly how much of each chemical and growth factor you’re adding. With wounding, it’s a crapshoot because everyone responds differently to the wounding. There are some individuals – and some follicles – that are way up at the “terrific responder” end of the graph, and they respond really well – but they’re also a tiny minority, and always will be.
I’m just saying, I’m sick and tired of the selective attention and novelty effect that this “wounding” thing has triggered. It doesn’t deserve any of it. It’s just an idea, with very slim real world results to back it up, and the research has already superseded it.
How do you know this? This is sheer assumption on your part. And it’s basically your whole point.
The vast numbers of men who use something like Minox (and closely scrutinize the area treated to document progress) is astronomically higher than the number of men who test dermabrasion with that kind of precision.
You’re screaming in block letters that
WOUNDING IS NO DIFFERENT THAN GROWTH FACTORS!!
But repetition is not persuasion.
Where are the examples of a single growth factor injection producing any full size terminal hairs on long-balded skin? The MPB world is full of guys who can point to an occasional thick terminal hair produced by needling.
[quote]What works in a few outliers will not work in the vast, vast majority of people – and that includes wounding.
[postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
How do you know this? This is sheer assumption on your part. And it’s basically your whole point. [/quote]
How do I know this? Because if people had noticed that dermabrasion could reliably grow lots of hair, it would have become huge news long, long ago, and people would just be getting dermabrasion to cure their MPB, and we wouldn’t even be here discussing this, because hair loss would be solved.
Histogen. And I wish I had the time to discuss HSC further in my post above. Histogen has already showed us photographic evidence of what they believe is a combination of de novo (brand new hairs) and revived miniaturized follicles. They’ve shown photos of biopsy cross-sections, the same sections of scalp, before and after, and it clearly shows new hair growth – and it’s fairly impressive.
Please note that I’m NOT saying that their actual results are amazing enough for their HSC product to be called a “hair loss cure”. In fact I think the problem they are having is that its action is less consistent and predictable than they hope – and the consistency problem probably accounts for the length of time it’s taking for them to improve it and get it on the market somewhere.
But just because you’re fixated on wounding doesn’t mean stuff like this should be off your radar. Histogen’s HSC is an example of an injectible solution of growth factors and proteins which has resulted in brand new hairs, and regenerated hairs, growing in bald areas. Just as good as your 1/1,000,000 idiosyncratic response wounding anecdotes, in fact much much better because at least you can know and control the amount of growth factors you’re adding – it’s not a wild crap shoot like wounding is.
Here we go with the straw men again.
Fair point. Histogen has apparently have seen some de novo hair growth. Their progress has been so little for so long that I’ve begun to forget about them lately, to be honest.
But you are always bringing up your belief that their hairs aren’t likely to last without repeated treatments. Have you changed your mind on that? Much of the reason we got into this debate is because you keep saying any gains from growth factors would need to be chronically boosted just to survive.
There is nothing 1/1,000,000 about guys growing some occasional nice big terminals from needling. If you think that’s rare then you just haven’t been paying attention to people’s experimentations with needling. It’s not even unusual.
What is unusual, but 100% possible, is people growing thick, dense patches of de novo scalp hairs from cancer meds. IMO that deserves understanding more than anything else.
Those two cases were not 1/1,000,000 unless there have already been well over 2,000,000 people treated with Gefitnib. IMO it was likely caused by the drug + sunburns + other possible factors as yet unknown.
Sure, maybe the scenario causing their growth is practically useless for treating MPB . . . but what if it’s not?
[quote]Fair point. Histogen has apparently have seen some de novo hair growth. Their progress has been so little for so long that I’ve begun to forget about them lately, to be honest.
But you are always bringing up your belief that their hairs aren’t likely to last without repeated treatments. Have you changed your mind on that? Much of the reason we got into this debate is because you keep saying any gains from growth factors would need to be chronically boosted just to survive.[/quote]
Yes, I do say that, and I believe it 100%. It goes along with everything I’ve learned in my rather advanced education in biochemistry and cell physiology (I’m also in a Master’s program in Biotechnology right now, re-taking more updated versions of the Biochemistry and Cell Physio classes I took as an undergad and in a previous grad program).
Let me be very clear on my positions:
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I firmly believe that growth-factor mediated growth (i.e., by adding growth factors in whatever form or by whatever means, short of adding new cells), will absolutely have to be chronically re-booted, to maintain the growth of the new or regenerated hairs.
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I am absolutely fine with the above, as long as the treatment doesn’t involve anything traumatic or dangerous to the scalp and follicles, like chronic abrasion. As long as you have a reliable way of growing and maintaining cosmetically impressive amounts of hair, and there is no collateral damage to the tissues or cells, it makes no difference to me whatsoever that you have to do repeat treatments. I am all in! If any of what I’ve ever written about this subject made you think otherwise, you haven’t really been close attention to what I’ve been writing. My negativity about chronic re-treatments are a caveat ONLY for those treatments which are problematic for other reasons – like a worrisome tendency to promote cancer/tumor growth, or a tendency to traumatize the tissue. (By the way, Histogen isn’t 100% in the clear on the former, to be sure – though I’m still somewhat hopeful about its potential.)
Okay, great. Fine. Maybe GF injections cannot produce lasting hairs. I have no problem with that concept.
But wounding CAN produce lasting hairs.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
Okay, great. Fine. Maybe GF injections cannot produce lasting hairs. I have no problem with that concept.
But wounding CAN produce lasting hairs.[/quote]
But it seems like just a few, not on everyone, and not every time you do it. It’s extremely rare.
Otherwise, you’d try it again to get more hairs, right?
Wouldn’t you want to fill in the rest of that bald area?
And if you don’t want to try it again because you’re worried about tissue/follicle damage, then… well, it’s not really a solution for anyone after all, is it?
Are we gonna repeat the whole thread now?
I don’t advocate wounding alone to treat MPB.
I advocate the STUDY of wounding’s hair generating effects.
The HM industry is idiotic for spending $200+ million and 15+ years on other experimental stuff without figuring this out.
OK, fair enough. I just think you can study wounding six days from Sunday and it’ll always come back to the release of growth factors involved in wound healing. Nothing mysterious about it at all. It’s not the Lost Ark or something.
It’s like, if some complete novice at golf, goes onto the green and shoots 1,000 golf balls and 999 go into the rough, but one lands a hole-in-one. And then someone wants to hold that guy up as the world’s foremost expert to teach complete novices the world’s best golf swing… instead of analyzing where he went wrong when he totally missed the other 999 shots.
And where do you get the idea that 999 out of 1000 scalp wounds (of the correct types) never produce any new hairs?
As far as I can tell you made this up out of thin air. I assume it’s because conventional wisdom does not say hacking up the scalp regrows balded hair.
That assumption is fairly logical at a glance. But its not exactly airtight proof. I don’t think it’s a solid enough reason to dismiss the possibility that I bring up.
There IS a track record of wound-induced hair growth being observed. One of the most respected hair scientists on earth has spent a decade on research that began with this concept.
That was meant as a metaphor – not an exact statistical example. If anything, it’s probably even less than that.
So did Cotsarelis originally launch Follica to investigate the commercial application of some 1-in-10,000 freak event? I don’t think so. He knew there was more to the wounding & hair growth phenomenon than that.
Why are we still rehashing misunderstandings here that have been discussed and clarified before a hundred times?
It was NOT Cotsarelis who launched Follica. He transferred part of his interest in the “discovery” elaborated in his wounding paper to Follica, which was launched by Daphne Zohar as part of PureTech Ventures. Follica was an entity quickly set up as a vehicle for his “wounding” concept, but it is not his company.
Dr. Cotsarelis is (or was) a shareholder, and I believe a member of their medical advisory board, but he didn’t launch the company and does not run it. (Although, to be sure, the company sometimes does press releases and other announcements which vaguely suggest and imply that it is somehow “his” company, by somehow associating him with the day-to-day operations of the company. I believe that when they do that, it is purely for public relations reasons.)
I’m sure he made some money up-front, on the initial transaction with Follica, as well as still potentially standing to make more money if the continuing research ever does lead to a marketable treatment – but that is VERY far from sure. To be honest, I don’t think that Dr. Cotsarelis believes that Follica will come up with anything marketable at this point. Basically, he’s already made something on the initial deal 10+ years ago, so at this point, he probably doesn’t really have any more “skin in the game”. He’d be a fool to sit around waiting for them. I’d guess he has absolutely nothing to lose if they fail (if shares worth 0 now are worth 0 in five years or when the company folds, he’s not really out anything), and as we know he’s busy researching a VERY long list of other hair regrowth ideas.
And yes, it is about some 1/10,000 freak event – or even less common than that, maybe 1/100,000 or something like that. The whole scientific model of Follica is NOT to commercialize some procedure which simply dermabrades or wounds the scalp. If it were that alone, they would never get anywhere. The whole model is based on finding some putative compound that COMBINED with wounding, would yield a lot of hair. Got that?
And still, to this day, after more than 10 years from Follica’s founding, there is still no public evidence they’ve found that compound. The one public trial of wounding in conjunction with some compound (in Germany) reportedly “failed”.
Bottom line – if “wounding” really could grow thousands of terminal hairs on a bald scalp – alone or combined with some exogenous compound – we’d all know it by now.