Jackson, you mentioned the word “picture” or “pictures” four times in your post. You’re repeating yourself a bit. We get your point.
It’s been pointed out before that all the scammers have “pictures” on their websites. And all the old-time scammers used to have “pictures” in their literature. (Actually, your use of the term “picture” is technically wrong. A picture is a drawing, diagram, or rendering. What you mean is a “photograph” or “photo” for short. And usually the ones shown by the scammers are either doctored, or faked in some way, plain and simple.)
The people who have been following HM only, say, 2 years, have seen a lot of what they call “promises” (actually, not so much promises as simply ongoing progress reports and statements made by some of the principal researchers.)
The fact that these regular progress reports and statements have raised your expectations to the point where you’re all hot and bothered, you’re sweating bullets, and your (body) hair stands on end at the slightest mention of HM, and you expect to see something on the market YESTERDAY, is your problem. These companies are simply doing what any biotech company will do, concerning testing of a new product. They are issuing regular progress reports, combined with ESTIMATES of when the product might first become available.
Those of us, like myself and JB who haven’t been following the progress of HM for 1 or 2 or 3 years, like many of the anxious people here – but for TEN YEARS – see all this in context. We have watched the long, upward arc of this technology, from an article in an obscure Dutch newspaper – that reached the Internet in the English-speaking world purely by chance – about an even more obscure HT doctor in Maastricht splitting hair follicles and calling it “hair multiplication”, and patenting a basic cell-based procedure, all the way to today’s official, government-monitored clinical trials being undertaken by two well-financed multinational biotech companies, staffed by labs full of the best hair science researchers – MDs and PhDs – in the world.
It’s been a long, long wait to get to this point, and I think many of the people here who have only been watching this thing unfold for a year or two are painfully misinformed and aren’t seeing today’s development in context. Every time ICX or Aderans comes out with a statement or press release, these “newbies” read it as some kind of “promise”, and then when HM doesn’t instantly materialize, they get infuriated and see it as some kind of deliberate fraud being perpetrated by nothing but a higher, more educated class of scammers and snake-oil salesmen, really just modern-day clones of all the other hairloss scammers in history that created that old cliché of false promises that so many know so well.
And they always go back to demanding the “pictures”. As if that alone will prove that HM is viable.
Meanwhile many of these people are buying laser combs, and slathering god-knows-what on their heads, all in the vain belief that a full head of hair will miraculously sprout therefrom, one blessed day.
Addendum: A final few words about “pictures”. Has it occurred to anyone that the reason there are no pictures of “former Norwood 5 and 6” guys with “mops” of hair from HM, is that before full-blown HM clinical trials were approved by the UK government, to inject a person’s whole head with cells was de facto illegal, and that even if it were done, if phootographs of it were shown publicly, it would be tantamount to admitting doing something illegal? Not only that, but most likely, there are no such test patients with “mops”, because the extant companies working on this decided they would not secretly violate the law and inject people’s entire scalps with cells. If they did, any informed consent might be invalid (since the procedure was not yet approved for testing) and then they’d be in a huge legal mess.
So, the only patients photographable are people with small test patches from Phase I trials. As for Gho, he’s been doing tests for a while, but once I contacted a lady at the Dutch government agency which oversees human clinical trials (including cell therapy), and she DENIED ANY KNOWLEDGE of Dr. Gho and his HM work.
Be that as it may, Phase II government-sanctioned trials are now being conducted by ICX in the United Kingdom. This is a publicly-known, widely-reported FACT. FACT: ICX is a public corporation being traded on a branch of the London Stock Exchange. FACT: ICX’s Phase II trials are being done to satisfy the official requirements of the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK equivalent to the American FDA. FACT: Somewhere at ICX, photographs of its Phase I (and Phase II) trials patients exist, but for whatever reason, ICX has not released them to the public. And why should they? To satisfy a few loons on a hairloss forum?
