There's been like a dozen of studies on topical melatonin and it's affect on hair growth, almost all have come to statistical conclusions that it has a positive effect. You taking it orally doesn't matter.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.researchgate.net
Or it's because there is no money to be made with substances that cant be patented, so companies don't care to throw money into the research?
Companies can still mix it onto solutions and rebrand it as a hairless treatment
There's no money in incremental hair growth. No one wants to spend money to get a easily patented product tested and approved just so it can preform even worse then household name rogain that also doesn't work for most people. That's why we still have finasteride+min 30 years later, people don't give a sh*t about 10% hair growth and to beat that requires real drug discovery and trials.
This.
Well, I think they still have value. For me, finasteride is losing it's effectiveness after 5+ years and I'm a minoxidil non responder. What should I do? Give up? Or find treatments that can actually at least do something?
Well, there is oral and topical min and finasteride and dutasteride and then Keto 2 percent and blue/green dandruff shampoos for inflammation. Those all work but yeah, I would say that a person unable to take any of these meds should throw in the towel. There's massage and microneedling which can also help and polysorbate 80 is inexpensive and may work like keto.
Oral min is off the table, I'm not going to mess with my heart (bad hearts run in the family) for hair. I thought about adding dutasteride but it also seems like a poor trade off long term to nuke my neuro-steriods long term.
Yeah if you have the dough, time and inclination why not. But for many people trying a false or poor remedy might be likely to put them off the meds that really work. The other thing is the absolutism about, "oh, I wont try that one because" negates the scientific reality of titration of strength. There are many permutations as to how to use oral min. The standard for females is below 2.5mg daily but combined with 25mg of spironolactone, also daily. This is such a small amount of oral min that it's difficult to measure without the actual Loniten pills but drinking literally one drop a day of topical min can make a huge difference for some.
The circles under the eyes are kind of big deal lol, I had a few comments last year when I got them that I looked exhausted all the time. I would agree that "who cares" if topical minoxidil actually held gains or did something significant, but it really doesn't in a vast majority of people. The usage stats are that basically under 2% of people are still using topical min 2 years after start.
are you taking oral min aT the moment? thanks
That's assuming extremes instead of median outcomes. You must have a really attractive face. I mean, once minoxidil had no prescription requirement, maybe in the early '90's I just used it and never stopped up to now. No, I never saw any regrowth and I was on finasteride too so that makes it hard to ascribe results but I got at least 15 years of all but complete maintenance on the two. I didn't know that there were side effects for some people so that wasn't even a consideration because I felt nothing and I saw nothing during a 15 year period where I used them both. I mean, not even hair results except my hairline seemed to have frozen in time. Around the age of 49, they started not working as well, and I was on Keto too, so I decided on HRT. I had a big family with lots of children but my looks were essential to me job-wise and life-wise. Having boobs, wasn't a concern in this scenario. So, I am all about facial and scalp improvement at the same time but retin-A and differin are out there, arguably fully able to quell any facial effects from minoxidil.
I took oral. I am not disputing that melatonin might be good for health at all but probably not enough juice to improve a hairline. It's a great anti-oxidant though, so I probably need to start using it again.