There is only one way to define a real cure for hair loss. Whatever the procedure or product is, it must be able to grow HAIR AT WILL. By that, I mean to really qualify as a cure, rather than just a treatment, it must be 100% reliable and there should be no guessing. On a normal scalp (not a damaged or scarred scalp), it should have the ability to grow unlimited hair. I use the term “hair at will”, which means that if you use the treatment, it is guaranteed to grow hair, in direct proportion to how much treatment is received. That is, input must be directly proportional to output.
No treatment that works only on, say, 25% of the people, or works pretty well on 10%, great on 30%, and not at all on 60%, or anything like that, is a cure. Hair regrowth must be GUARANTEED, in proportion to how much treatment is received.
The problem with almost all the drugs, topicals, and chemicals we’re seeing under research is that, even from the start, the researchers are not guaranteeing that these things will work on everyone, or to the same extent on everyone.
A real cure has to work to the same extent on everyone.
I think only cell therapy with stem cells, or tissue engineering by creating proto-follicles – in other words, some type of cell-based treatment, will eventually guarantee a real cure.
The MPB community has a big hangup about “cures” versus “treatments” because we’ve basically never had decent treatment options.
(Yes, we have the Big 3. And the amount of hair gained for their costs/drawbacks is a bad joke in the big picture.)
Wanna talk about CURES? We can’t cure fingernails growing too long. Or hair growing too long. Or teeth yellowing. Or crooked teeth. But we have practical treatment options for these problems.
We don’t need to CURE male pattern baldness. We just need some treatment options that aren’t insultingly bad.
Actually, we CAN cure a lot of the things you listed…
Hair growing too long - cut it
Teeth yellowing - there are teeth whitening treatments out now that will make even really yellow teeth look brilliant white. No fakery – they will actually turn your yellow teeth whiter than a polar bear in a snow storm. And they’re still your real teeth, 100% real. Not dentures or anything like that.
Crooked teeth – Oh, come on. Braces have been around for many decades. They work really well. Now there’s even something called Invisalign - transparent braces you can hardly see. The point is they will straighten your teeth perfectly, and no one will ever notice the difference.
Let’s get real.
There’s so much semantical bullsh*t that people have been bandying around for years about what the definition of a MPB “cure” is.
But the fact is, the definition of a cure is something which is crystal clear, and it’s out there. I don’t mean the cure is out there, I mean the definition. Everybody unconsciously knows what it is… It’s a treatment that is guaranteed to restore full-thickness hair on a bald scalp (unless of course the scalp has been destroyed by scarring or burning or something like that). And it would have to be able to work equally well on every balding or bald person’s scalp.
That’s a very simple definition of a cure. Just because some people can’t imagine it today, doesn’t make the definition any less valid.
If you don’t want to argue over semantics then don’t proclaim new definitions for commonly understood terms.
A “cure” is when a problem is permanently gone. That means your nails don’t ever grow too long again, on their own. Your teeth will never yellow again, no matter how much brown crap you eat & drink. Etc. I don’t call straightened teeth a “cure” because some people do need to wear a retainer permanently to keep them that way.
A “treatment” is when you do an ongoing job of handling the problem in some way or another. Cutting your nails every week is a cheap easy painless treatment with no side effects. Its not a cure but it takes care of the problem in pretty much any other sense.
We all want the same thing - a way to restore & keep all our hair. We all want a way that involves a minimal amount of time, money, effort, and side effects.
The MPB community bitches, “I want a CURE, not a TREATMENT!!” because we’ve never had a decent treatment. Or expectations for a “treatment” have become terrible because science has had a surprisingly hard time making any progress on treating our condition up to now. Our most potent “treatment” in 2016 generally leaves us no hairier than we started in 5-6 years, costs a lot of money, causes sexual side effects, and we cannot quit using it or we end up worse than before. That’s a fukking shiity treatment option in the big picture.
Imagine if we could soak our heads in a cheap harmless chemical for 10 minutes once a week, and that would be enough to keep all our follicles growing full size. It wouldn’t be a “cure” in the technical sense. But it would be a good enough treatment to get us all off this forum once & for all.
Q. Why wouldn’t we call this a cure?
A. Because we couldn’t just soak our heads one single time at the first hint of MPB and get a NW#1 for the rest of our life.
Cal, we all know thay the reason people come to hair loss forums like this HM forum on HairSite, is to discuss a remedy for their hair loss, which hair loss sufferers, as well as the media, collectively call a “cure” for MPB.
Whether we call it a “cure” or a “remedy” (perhaps that word is more appropriate but no one uses it)… whatever term we use, we all know damn what it means.
To us here, in our context, it means fixing our hair loss as it exists NOW. It means restoring our hair. It doesn’t mean preventing hair loss from ever happening – that would be great, but how would that help US?
Where do you get the idea that I’m holding out for a true permanent cure?
All I ever said is don’t change the definitions of treatments vs cures. I spent most of that last comment explaining why the MPB community’s demand for a true cure is an overreaction to our disappointing treatments up to now. (The inference being that a true cure is not as necessary as people think it is.)
Not saying that about you cal, but as for me - sure, I’ll take any good treatment that comes along, but if we’ve learned one thing about MPB “treatments” – it’s that none of them are spectacular at regrowing hair, and none of them have a high degree of reliability. Even if you define them strictly as “treatments” that is still true. That’s why, extrapolating this into the future, I don’t have a lot of confidence in “treatments”.
What I’m saying is, the next qualitative step up from this is a remedy or a cure.
That is because all our treatments have absolutely sucked up to now. Like I’ve been saying. They have all be piss-poor methods that slowed down loss at best and came with major side effects, costs, or practical PITAs.
A cure means a one-time thing that removes the problem for life. Anything else is a treatment. We don’t NEED a cure, we just need a treatment that isn’t a cruel joke for a change.
I think we don’t have to spend too much time discussing these subtleties.
We won’t have a cure/treatment that regrows our lost youth hairline for decades to come.
We all know this. After over 25 years waiting for a cure/decent-treatment the improvement has been an unquestionable zero. Nothing. Nada. We are at square zero with minoxidil still the only “solution” available.
Contrary to what Cal is saying, I think we can give up waiting for a “decent treatment”… most likely, there will be none. The next stage of the game is a remedy or CURE. A cure is not a “partial treatment” – it is guaranteed regrowth of unlimited hair. And I believe this will come by way of a procedure using live cells – NOT drugs, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, pills or topicals. It will come through a cell-based procedure or it will not come at all.
I absolutely, totally, 100% disagree. I got much better results with topical RU58841
than topical minoxidil in combo with finasteride so this means that it is possible for drug
companies to make a treatment that is better than the treatments that are
available.
“Better treatments than the existing options” is not aiming very high. What we currently have does virtually nothing to regrow lost hair. It can’t even halt continuing loss for more than a few years.
We’ve had this RU debate before Jarjar. You are convinced it’s a game-changer that brings back huge amounts of lost hair but your supply became bad after a few months. Everyone else who has taken RU (including some human clinical trials) concludes that the stuff gives a strong initial rebound of lost hair but it plateaus quickly - just like with every other MPB treatment known to man that involves reducing androgen damage.
Jarjar – if you’ve been reading my recent posts on this (a different thread), I did mention your success with RU 58841. I also mentioned Kevin Nguyen’s amazing success with a mixture of Minox foam and other stuff.
My point was that these are all outliers. In your case, you had full regrowth (I have no reason to doubt you, your story is credible)… but you got unacceptable side effects.
In Kevin Nguyen’s case, his hair loss was very recent (I believe less it started less than 2 years before his treatment success, but then advanced rapidly to about Norwood 4-5).
Both of these situations happen more than people expect, but they’re poorly reproducible, and are connected with either unacceptable medical side effects, or some other unusual situation (like very recent onset, very rapid hair loss).
What I’m saying is NOT that there aren’t drugs and chemicals that haven’t produced nearly full regrowth on scalps with pretty advanced MPB. What I’m saying is that we probably won’t see SAFE AND REPRODUCIBLE examples of this with drugs and chemicals.
RU58841 grows way more hair than Finasteride or Dutasteride even when those two
are combined with minoxidil. Lots of other posters have said so too. I’ve read many
posts (at various sites) wherein posters talk about RU being the best treatment
they’ve found so far.
My hair loss slowed down but continued on propecia and Dutasteride even when
combined with minoxidil. RU58841 stopped my hair loss and caused total reversal
of my hair loss.
I stopped because for some reason it stopped working and caused me slight gynecomastia
which would undoubtedly worsen if I continued using the drug.
Both dutasteride and propecia negate ONLY ONE androgen - DHT whereas RU
negates ALL androgens. Hence, you get better results.
Many of the people it didn’t work on probably got bad RU or fake RU.
Lots of posters at various sites have claimed excellent results with RU. Lots. It’s
better than finasteride or dutasteride. My hair loss slowed down but it did continue
when I took finasteride or dutasteride even with minoxidil but my hair loss stopped
and reversed dramatically on RU58841 with minoxidil.
Finasteride/dutasteride work on ONE androgen - DHT. RU58841 works on ALL
androgens. That is THE difference. But I don’t want anymore black-market drugs.
I’m not optimistic at all. Everything fails. I get optimistic about a promising treatment
and then it fails. I think we may have to wait another 5 - 10 years for a treatment.
At this point, I have to agree with you on the pessimism thing. I think our hopes have been dashed so many times, it’s now looking like we’re no closer to a real remedy than we were, say, 10 years ago.
Of all the more recent developments, I’ve had the most hope in Sanford-Burnham and Dr. Terskikh, but now it seems they’ve gone into hiding. One researcher stated that it seems Dr. Terskikh was actually growing mouse hair instead of human hair, and didn’t even realize it. If that’s true then the whole thing was a false alarm. The article on his stem cell-based procedure is still on the Sanford-Burnham “Beaker” website, and the comments section is still there, but it hasn’t received a serious comment from the public in a long time. Dr. T and SB haven’t made a peep in public. If they really had something, they would be taking advantage of this by doing regular media.
Regarding RU, yes, lots of people have had success with it, but I want to state my approach to this flat out with the following mathematical formula:
Incredible treatment that grows tons of hair + Unacceptable side effects = 0
I call your attention to the right side of the equation, i.e., “Zero”. If you focus in on that information, you’ll see that it’s fruitless to get worked up about things that grow tons of hair, if they also grow you breasts or tumors or something else like that. As they say, it’s a “non-starter”. Won’t get us anywhere, so back to square one.
IIRC the human studies on RU reported results similar to oral finasteride. It’s decent but not a game-changer. Plenty of people have tried dumping gallons of the stuff on their heads and got side effects but I’m speaking about practical regimens. There is no such thing as a topical with zero systemic sides, it’s just a matter of degree.
Bottom line, we have seen what is possible by fighting the androgen damage. Fin, Dut, Spiro, RU, castration, exogenous hormone supplementation, combinations of things . . . it’s all been done. If you aren’t willing to manipulate your systemic hormone profile to sex-change levels then you cannot regrow major amounts of hair. Period. You can slow down the long term loss and get a couple years of initial rebound improvement.
I am curious, and maybe a bit optimistic, about the JAK inhibitor testing lately. That’s one of the only things worth watching in my opinion.
The crucial issue is that it has grown hair on men. They were AA patients rather than AGA. The question is whether the JAK drug effect is far enough downstream in the follicle shut-down process to work for AGA too. The researchers seem to think it might be.
After 15+ years of following MPB I will say this - we never know anything about anything until it has grown big hair on live humans. No amount of “it logically should work because it does XYZ in testing” amounts to jack shiit.
The MPB process is just too complex and not well enough understood. This vicious condition is too clever at getting around every goddamn thing scientists come up with. It’s really amazing that a natural process with so many different stages is proving so difficult to interrupt.
No visible regrowth in human testing = no cause for optimism yet.
Cal, I really don’t care who says RU and finasteride are the same.
There are guys all over the internet reporting that RU is giving them better results than anything else. You can quote whoever you want but I don’t care.
RU grows considerably more hair than finasteride or dutasteride or either of these 5AR inhibitors plus minoxidil. Here is a report indicating that minoxidil is at least as good as finasteride and then goes on to say it’s much better than finasteride in some studies.
But the bottom line is that you don’t know what you’re talking about and I DO know what I’m talking about. I have used both finasteride and dutasteride in combination with minoxidil and RU58841 blows the doors of both of them when it comes to efficacy.
As I have repeatedly stated, and as many others on the internet are saying, RU58841 is much more effective than finasteride and dutasteride.
RU58841 negates ALL androgens whereas finasteride and dutasteride negate ONLY one androgen. Yes that one androgen is the strongest androgen but there is still plenty of androgen synthesis going on in the skin of a man’s scalp when he’s taking finasteride or dutasteride but when he uses RU58841 there is much less androgen synthesis going on in the skin of his scalp. That’s the bottom line. People who know what they’re talking about understand that RU58841’s superior negation of androgen synthesis would produce better results.
But RU has other problems.
I’m sorry to say but I’m not very optimistic at this time. I think we’re 5 - 10 years away from an effective treatment. And probably closer to 10 years than 5 years.
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