Exploring The Propecia Paradox - Need To Get This Off My Chest

Wisemiller

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Lying in bed the other night after scrolling through the hair loss forums, and something came to mind:

We have a medication that either stops, regrows, or slows down hairloss to an immaterial rate that works 90% of the time, the one every hair loss doctor will recommend, the one that studies have proven. This is a cure for hair loss. There are very few other drugs that solve a medical problem with this sort of success with only very rare (though probably over-represented) side effects. This costs less than $2 a day, an insignificant sum. We are in the information age, I am sure that once any man notices their Norwood 2-3 hair they would take the five seconds to type in "hair loss" into google and find out about this drug that has been available for many years.

Why are people still eager for a hairloss cure?
Why are there still so many balding men? I was in a restaurant the other day and despite my significant thinning in the last two years, I had the fullest head of hair there. Why arn't these men taking propecia? Why don't they care?

What is going on here? Does it not actually work or does the vast majority of society just not care about hair loss?

I'm about at Norwood 2-2.5 at 33 years old, and have been on this for 4 months after a year of failed rogaine. I am not really seeing a slow down of hair loss, but I promised myself I will not compare my before/after photos until the 6 month mark. I am very eager to see where I will fit in, but I will post those photos on here when the time comes.
 

Retinoid

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Propecia is definitely NOT a cure. I compare it to oral antibiotics when you have acne. It usually helps for most people unless it is very advanced, but oral antibiotics treat just a part of the equation, they lose their effectiveness over time and cause a lot of unnecessary side effects.

Propecia does a decent job at maintaining (however it seems to have an expiry date albeit many yrs) but does not always do well at regrowing significantly (if they have fibrosis already), which says it is not a cure. Plus it inhibits systemic hormones as opposed to targeting just the scalp. Balding men usually do not have high DHT so decreasing this is probably not good longterm for health. 5AR also does not just convert T to DHT, it converts other things such as neuropeptides.
 
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