Hair Loss Treatment Options

The hair loss industry is a multibillion-dollar business but the vast majority of commercially available products, estimated at 90%, are ineffective to the majority of hair loss sufferers. If one grew a single hair with each remedy out there, they would fill the entire head. Useless rubbish is not only bad for your wallet, it also wastes your valuable time while the hair loss continues. In order to find the most suitable treatment for your condition you should understand how various hair loss treatments work and what you can expect from them.

The currently available hair loss treatments can be, in the first place, divided into surgical and non-surgical therapies. Although there are only a few surgical techniques currently applied, the non-surgical spectrum is wide and confusing. There seem to be thousands of non-surgical treatment options available to those who seek to avoid hair surgery. Propecia and Rogaine might be amongst the best known medicinal hair loss treatments, while dried fruits of saw palmetto and a Chinese herb, He Shou Wu, also known as Fo-Ti, are the natural ingredients most often mentioned in alternative hair loss remedies.

The non-surgical hair loss therapies can be in principle broken down into medicinal and alternative treatments, whereas when considering methods of application, they can be divided into oral treatments, topical treatments and others, such as LaserComb. Alternative treatments are typically, but not exclusively, associated with using naturally derived active substances. Irrespective of the aforementioned breakdowns, hair growth treatments work either by blocking the activity of dihydrotestosterone, also called anti-androgens, or by stimulating new hair growth in the balding areas.

Dihydrotestosterone (acronym DHT) is a biologically-active metabolite of the male hormone testosterone that is believed to be the No.1 cause of both male and female form of hereditary baldness. DHT causes hair miniaturization as the hair becomes finer and thinner with every new hair growth cycle until the hair follicles fail to produce another hair and die. The exact mechanism by which DHT attacks and destroys hair follicles is not known, though. Finasteride, better known under its trade name Propecia, is the only clinically-proven and FDA-approved anti-androgen used to effectively treat male pattern baldness. It acts by preventing the creation of DHT in the scalp. Since the introduction of Propecia, many other drugs and alternative, mainly natural treatments have emerged claiming anti-androgen activity. Some of them are thought to work by a different mode of action than Propecia, such as preventing DHT from binding to the receptor sites in the follicle or blocking activity in the androgen receptor itself.

Minoxidil, also known under its trade name Rogaine (Regaine in Europe), is the best-known hair loss medicine amongst hair growth stimulants and the only other FDA approved hair loss treatment. It is believed that hair growth stimulants work by directly stimulating epithelial growth of hair follicles and some of them may also counteract the hardening of the hair follicles but the exact mechanism of their action has never been described. One thing that all types of hair growth stimulants have in common is their ability to prolong the length of the hair growth cycle, thus improving the ratio of hair in the growth phase versus hair in the resting phase and to increase the hair's diameter.

The naturally derived hair loss treatments are typically assumed to work by the aforementioned modes of action and are often presented as safer alternatives than medicinal treatments. There are not too many hair loss treatments out there that have been clinically proven and independently verified to be effective in treating baldness. Of those few existing, all happen to be medicinal drugs. Natural hair loss treatments have still to live up to their manufacturer and marketer claims.

When deciding about the most suitable hair loss product, one should always consider approaching the problem from different angles. It is best advised to use a combination of anti-androgen and hair growth stimulant, such as a Propecia/Rogaine combination. Alternative, hair loss treatments, for instance herbal remedies, should largely be considered as a complementary treatment, fine-tuning this basic regimen in order to achieve greater benefits.">