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Hey man, thanks. I'm certainly hoping that as well!
Quick update today first: I cut the dose to 2 mL of 0.25% last night, and this morning I just applied 0.5 mL of 0.25% to the hairline. I already feel so much better. My skin feels just mildly dry. My eyes are still a bit dry but not raw/painful.
So that was 5 mg last night and 1.25 mg this morning. Down from 10 mg twice a day which was f*****g insane and made me feel like I was being cooked alive from dryness. I'm guessing I'll have to keep my maintenance dose at ~5 mg or less per day. I will keep tweaking, monitoring, and updating until I can find a stable, tolerable, effective dose.
To answer your questions, first of all, there is no good reason in my opinion to ever cycle any effective hair loss treatment. Androgenic hair loss is a continuous process and thus you need a continuous solution. Going through periods of treating your hair and then neglecting your hair is not beneficial. If you want to keep your hair through life, you need to find a tolerable treatment that you can maintain safely or comfortably on a regular basis for life. Cycling would simply be less efficient than finding a stable regular comfortable dose and it would have no benefits I can imagine.
As for your question of how topical darolutamide should compare to oral tranny regimens, in my opinion, darolutamide should be considered the absolute "gold standard" as the strongest theoretical method possible for androgen deprivation of the scalp (whether topical or oral).
Tranny regimens are different from standard regimens in two ways: (1) they use strong oral antiandrogens like spironolactone or cyproterone, and (2) they often involve estrogen. Estrogen is a bit of a wild card. Its role in hair growth is controversial. But as for the antiandrogenic component, darolutamide is far stronger than any conventional tranny medication.
Based on my research, the potency of darolutamide's androgen inhibition dwarfs any other known existing conventional anti-androgen by a massive margin. I also do have some limited personal experience with using all of oral spironolactone, oral cypro, and topical darolutamide. Based on my personal experience, as well as the theory, I think it is fair to say topical darolutamide is definitely the strongest.
I believe oral spironolactone at 200 mg a day or oral cypro at 100 mg a day would both be much, much weaker than 5-10 mg of darolutamide applied to the scalp daily if compared in a head-to-head trial.
I base this conclusion primarily on the fact that I took spironolactone 200 mg and cypro 100 mg each for a few weeks just before starting daro. Both were strong enough to give me severe erectile/sexual dysfunction. By the end my dick was basically dead on cypro which was no surprise. Doses of 100 mg cypro a day are used commonly for chemical castration of sex offenders. Despite this, neither spironolactone nor cypro was remotely strong enough in anti-androgenic capacity to shut down the sebaceous/sweat glands through my scalp or my entire body the way daro has over the span of the past few weeks. I noticed slightly less body odor and less oily facial skin on cypro and spironolactone but that's it.
Furthermore, neither cypro or spironolactone are strong enough that in the highest doses they can be used as single agents to castrate prostate cancer. On the other hand, that is exactly what darolutamide was designed for. Darolutamide in its highest doses can shut down the most aggressive and mutated prostate cancers better than anything, all by itself.
Darolutamide is so much stronger of an anti-androgen than cypro or spironolactone even in tiny doses, it should not remotely be considered in the same class, for any application.
The degree of recovery that would be possible on a treatment like topical darolutamide would depend on the individual. How much one is capable of a major recovery is based primarily on how long that person has been balding, how much regenerative capacity their scalp has, and what growth stimulants you are using. But certainly in my opinion, topical darolutamide has a far greater capacity to fully castrate your hair follicles than any standard oral tranny regimen like cypro/spironolactone, and castrating the follicles is the first step towards a potential major recovery. So I do think tranny type massive recoveries are theoretically possible if combined with a good scalp and growth stimulants.
The potency is what gives darolutamide great potential but also danger.
As for the danger, and what I was posting about earlier, I think I'm going to write a big long "Why You Should Never Use Darolutamide" post explaining all the reasons I know of and put a link in my signature. I think it will make me feel better and help me feel freer to post my opinions and experiences which I enjoy sharing, without worrying how people might interpret it.
Last update: My sexual function is steadily improving on daro. I think the original theory I posted that sexual dysfunction is caused by anti-androgenism in the brain will prove correct, and since daro doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, sexual side effects should be minimal. But I still need more time there to see for sure.
In principle, if you subscribe to the theory that blocking DHT/androgens can shrink/atrophy penile tissue over time, then systemic daro would still pose that risk over time. But the goal should be to minimize systemic daro anyway. And as a last resort, a person could always do what the penis enlargement forum guys do and get some DHT gel (Andractim) to rub on your dick periodically to compensate.
It just would become funny of course. Blasting anti-androgens on the scalp and then rubbing testosterone/DHT on your dry eyes and shrinking dick to compensate. LOL. That would not be a rational approach.
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