This makes it worse, not better as an experiment. I was actually downplaying how bad the reasoning he applied was
From memory, he changed all these parameters at once:
1. Stopped finasteride
2. Started topical dutasteride (very limited data on how well dutasteride works in this modality)
3. Use custom homemade topical vehicle instead of standard, made in large batches where the formulation wasn't consistent month to month
4. Included Estriol
I don't remember timeframe, but I think it was under 6 months (too short timeframe)
And his evaluation was looking in the mirror vs any objective measurements (there are really easy improvements possible here)
tl;dr - if you swapped Estriol with "scalp massages" in that approach, nobody would accept this as evidence they work (nor should they)