Pluck hair to grow hair? Ground breaking study says YES. Blog Archives - Jezic, Goran (hairphysician.com)
The article says that it could take 10 years to transpose this to humans. When I first read the article I thought it would some time for top hair specialists to see and absorb the study, and transpose it to human heads.
But your post shows that Houston Hair Transplant has seen the article and Houston Hair Transplant has the world renowned Dr. Rashid on staff. Hence, I see no reason why this technique has to wait 10 years to develop.
I don’t think that hair plucking requires FDA approval. I think Dr. Rishad could legally start plucking human hairs right now. It’s just a matter of figuring out the correct sequence, formation, and quantity to pluck in humans. Dr. Rishad has a deep expansive knowledge of hair cellular biology so I figure that he could rapidly absorb the details of the study and try to apply the information to humans very soon. If I was in Houston I would give it a go with Dr. Rishad.
I’m wondering if Dr. Rishad will be trying this systematic controlled hair plucking on humans soon?
I would bet very high that we cannot make any practical use of this info/principle.
MPB has been around for thousands of years, and nobody ever liked having it. If there was any way to fight it using available methods mankind would have discovered it centuries ago. Whatever eventually fixes this condition for us will require something that wasn’t available/possible until recently.
Lavender oil has a slight positive impact on hair. So does Tea Tree oil. Emu oil. Etc.
Now think about this - how many lifetimes (not years, but LIFETIMES) do you think it would take for one of us forum members to accidentally stumble onto something like that, without any scientific knowledge to suggest trying it?
But people have found that out already. People have been balding enough, living enough, experimenting enough, and doing thing accidentally enough, to discover these things. The effect of centuries of people looking for solutions to these age-old problems adds up to an ENORMOUS amount of trial & error type research. (Is especially true for anything that involves wounds, with the way human life was in more primitive times.)
People have never found a plucking-based method of helping their hair before. I’m confident that means it does not exist.
I might be willing to bet a few bucks that you’re wrong.
Firstly, it’s a fact that the right growth factors and proteins can grow hair. And injury can cause the body to produce growth factors and proteins. Plucking could be considered an injury.
Secondly, key points in the article are that the plucking has to be done in very specific sequence and formation. Even if our ancestors thought of plucking hairs to prompt hair growth I doubt they would have stumbled on the correct sequencing and formation to pluck. As a matter of fact, we may still not know the correct sequencing and formation to pluck human hair to prompt human hair growth because we have thus far only determined the correct sequence and formation to pluck (to prompt hair growth) in mice, and the correct sequence and formation to pluck may be different for mice and humans. We may have to make some adjustments in order to transpose the concept to human heads.
Thirdly, I don’t think our ancestors would have even considered that it might be possible to get more hair by plucking the hair that they still had. I think that such an idea would have seemed illogical to our ancestors because the act of plucking hair would be immediately antithetical to what our ancestors would have been trying to accomplish. They were trying to get more hair and plucking hair initially results in less hair. The notion of plucking hair to get more hair is a concept that could only be born of the most modern science.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by cal[/postedby]
I would bet very high that we cannot make any practical use of this info/principle.
MPB has been around for thousands of years, and nobody ever liked having it. If there was any way to fight it using available methods mankind would have discovered it centuries ago. Whatever eventually fixes this condition for us will require something that wasn’t available/possible until recently. [/quote]
I totally agree. Well said!
What cal means is that over all the thousands and thousands of years men have been suffering from MPB, just by accident or serendipity, someone would have discovered this principle before. Think of all the millions of scalp injuries, all the times people have been wounded on their heads, all the crazy bald men who have probably plucked their remaining hairs…
There is really not one piece of empirical evidence in history we can point to where this practice has resulted in a cure.
It may be likely that plucking hair can release some growth factors or bump up the number of follicular cells slightly by stimulating them or shocking them into action a bit. The question is, does it do these things to the extent that it could actually make a significant difference and grow most of a balding guy’s hair back? I think we all know the answer to that question.
Our ancestors who had their hair plucked in the past had it plucked for reasons other than to test for new hair growth so they would not have been quantifying if it grew new hair or not.
Also, the hairs have to pulled in specific patterns and specific sequences and it’s highly doubtful that any of our ancestors who had their hair pulled out would have had the hair pulled in the exact correct pattern and sequence. Plus It has to be specific hairs. This information was not going to be discovered by some cowboy pulling out some other cowboy’s hair, or some Roman gladiator pulling out some other Roman gladiator’s hair.
Also, I would wager that the overwhelming majority of our ancestors who had their hair pulled out were younger people with full heads of hair whom had their hair pulled out in fist fights. People in their teens and early 20s are more likely to get into fist fights than adult balding people.
[quote][postedby]Originally Posted by roger_that[/postedby]
What cal means is that over all the thousands and thousands of years men have been suffering from MPB, just by accident or serendipity, someone would have discovered this principle before. Think of all the millions of scalp injuries, all the times people have been wounded on their heads, all the crazy bald men who have probably plucked their remaining hairs…
There is really not one piece of empirical evidence in history we can point to where this practice has resulted in a cure.[/quote]
I don’t know if this would work in humans or not, but I seriously doubt it has ever been done on humans the same as it was done in the successful mouse experiment. In the study it was determined that hairs have to be plucked in a specific pattern and sequence, and it has to be thinning hairs. And there is not “one piece of empirical evidence” that scalp injuries, head wounds, crazy bald guys plucking their remaining hairs led to hair being lost, by accident or serendipity, in the same pattern and sequence as in the mouse study or that the correct hairs being lost, and only the correct hairs. Keep in mind that the scientists tied other patterns and sequences of plucking hairs and those other patterns did not produce the same great results.
It has to be a specific pattern Roger and Cal.
Do you guys think that American frontier cowboys, Roman gladiators, and Philistines were losing their hair by accident and serendipity in a specific pattern?
And I’m not saying that I believe this concept can be transposed from mice to humans. I’m just saying that perhaps it can be. Remember this same experiment showed that even in mice you don’t get the same great results unless you pluck the hairs in a specific pattern. Perhaps it has never grown hair in man before because nobody has ever plucked the hair in the correct pattern. Look at this:
http://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2015/04/12/1033895_baldness-cure-hair-plucking.html
I may be wrong about sequence being important, but I think I did read that sequence is important in a different article. In any case, pattern is cited as key in ALL of the recent articles the past few days. And I do not believe that our ancestors has hair removed in the correct pattern.
Can you explain how people found out that something like tea tree oil slowed down loss (not visible regrowth)? Who was studying it? Who knew of MPB’s progressive nature that well? Who systematically put one substance after another on their heads for long periods of time to study the effects on hair growth? Who was looking for not just regrowth but a subtle loss reduction? The stuff stinks too. Who wants to walk around with that on their head unnecessarily?
When you try to break it down to an individual story these things always sound extremely farfetched.
And yet people have discovered them centuries ago.
Anything available before the 1900s has an ENORMOUS amount of real-world time to have been stumbled onto.
People have been injuring, and re-injuring, their heads for thosuands of years. That could cause hair plucking. Some people just pluck hairs compulsively. Etc. It seems farfetched that someone on this forum would have found it, but mankind as a whole would have stumbled onto it a long time ago.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. Using tree oil to end up with more hair and plucking hair to end up with more hair are two entirely different things.
Firstly, tree oil is a substance and plucking hair is an action. So right off the bat you have two different things going on.
Secondly, Everybody knows the old-time folks tried putting sheep sh!t on their heads to grow hair. Back in the old days people tried putting anything and everything on their heads to get more hair. I can imagine someone back then thinking to himself, “Hey maybe tree oil will grow hair on my head. I’ll rub tree oil on my head to see if I end up with more hair.” But everyone would know that the act of plucking hair would result in the immediate effect of less hair on one’s head so I can’t imagine people in the old days thinking, “I’ll pull out some of my remaining hair to see if I end up with more hair, and I’ll pull it out in a small pattern because I won’t end up with more hair unless I pluck the hair out in a small pattern.” I can’t imagine even 1 person back then thinking, “I have too little hair on my head so I will pull out some of my remaining hair in a small pattern so that I will have more hair on my head.”
And people traded all kinds of stuff for all kinds of other stuff back then so I can imagine some old time snake-oil charlatan selling tree oil to grow hair and then some of his victims noticing that their hair loss seemed to slow down. On the other hand, I can’t imagine some old-time charlatan trying to sell people the idea of pulling their own hair out of their heads to prompt new hair growth.
Yes there are people who pluck hair but maybe they don’t pluck their hair in the correct pattern.
I do not believe for one second that the people who have had head injuries would have randomly lost hair in the correct pattern. For one thing the plucking injury has to involve a small amount of space, and injuries sufficient to cause hair loss would probably be too large. Keep in mind that plucking hair in accordance with the study involved small areas of injury in terms of both width and DEPTH. Injuries that cause hair to be lost would probably be both wider and deeper than the optimum area of injury in the study. Creating a small injury from plucking hair on your head is not the same thing as losing scalp hair due to a deep wide gash in your head from walking into a sharp shelf for example.
Just so you know, I’m not saying that I have a lot of faith that pattern plucking will result in more hair growth. Truth to tell, I doubt it. I have doubts about all of these unproved treatments because they haven’t been proved yet and so many potential treatments have failed. That aside, it does seem to me that pattern-plucking is something that can be tested quickly and if it does work it could be on the market rapidly. That would be something if it worked. Wow! A dream come true.
I just got done reading that women who “overpluck” their eyebrows can permanently lose their eyebrows. Hmmmmmm.
Curiously, there’s plenty of anecdotal testimony from people who pluck unwanted hairs (eyebrows, mustaches, ears) that plucking only seems to make the hairs grow back stronger, but there is also anecdotal testimony of the opposite in the long run.
Science has always assured us that the former is an illusion and the latter very possibly true (“traction” alopecia).
But I wonder if both anecdotal observations are true.
Has science really tested either conclusion?
Where are the studies?
Show us the studies!
Good point.
There are lots of women who have permanent baldness in their eyebrows due to OVERplucking. Perhap permanent balding only happens when one plucks the same hairs very frequently, but maybe if you only pluck once in awhile that spurs new hair growth instead. Maybe.
Pluck away. I’ll crap myself if you ever manage to regrow a cosmetically useful amount of hair from it.
MPB is not new. Plucking hair out compulsively is not new. Going through stints of heavier & lighter plucking, and stints of trying to quit plucking only to relapse again, is not new. Tearing out random hairs at regular or irregular intervals because of helmets/headcoverings is not new. Etc.
The entire species has had literally thousands of years to stumble onto this phenomenon. Nobody has noticed it yet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ahab is onto something with his theory on follicles having a finite number of cycles. There isn’t any legit data proving it wrong, just long-held assumptions by everyone in the hair research world.
I used to pluck out my faint unibrow hairs. I don’t have to anymore. After several years of doing it the hairs stopped growing back.
To give this a fair test I think the plucking should be done by a pro who knows what he’s doing rather than by blokes on the internet doing it to themselves.
When you plucked out your unibrow hairs how often did you do it? If you do it often (OVERplucking) then your experience would not refute the possibility that if you plucked infrequently (say once every few years when you want to regrow hair) you might have the opposite effect.
Ahab might be right but I don’t know for sure. I do know that I read an article years ago that talked about how Eunuchs do not lose their hair. But at the end of the article it stated that if Eunuchs are injected with testosterone later in life they lose a lot of hair over a few weeks or months. So those Eunichs did not lose their hairs due to a limited number of cycles; rather they lost their hair suddenly because their hairs reached a point in time when they were vulnerable to androgens. The only reason they didn’t lose their hair sooner is that their hair had not been exposed to enough androgens to take their hair.
I plucked my unibrow hairs totally inconsistently. Sometimes every day, other times once in a few months. Basically I was shaving them with a razor every few days and plucking them on occasion.
The finite cycles idea is not proposed to replace the androgen ideas about MPB. It’s just one more possible detail about the way human hairs behave.
I don’t think that simply plucking hair enhance hair growth. Some researchers proved that plucking helps to stimulate hair growth, but it happens at a particular threshold. Below that estimated threshold, this plucking can’t influence the hair regenerative system instead will adversely affect hair growth. My doctor in Toronto says that this is as same as the stimulation of hair growth after hair restoration surgery. After the restoration, the restored hair will enhance the growth of surrounding hair by producing regenerative signal vibe. This process will enhance the speed of hair growth after surgery. However, the plucking process is not yet scientifically proven in humans.
They don’t plan to create a treatment from plucking.
They plan to find a molecule that triggers the pathway they saw with plucking.
I dont have the article handy with the researcher’s quote (who wrote the study), but it’s out there.
Right, but I think the problem is this concept of “quorum sensing” has only been found to work in rodents so far. There is no evidence I know of that it works in humans, except for the most remote speculation.