I will I.D, I'm absolutely delighted with my results, and it's still early days!
Cliff, my routine is just the usual: 1.25 mg finasteride every day, usually before bed, and 5% kirkland minoxidil once a day. I use 4 ml in total and try to cover all the areas that were thinning. If I applied it twice a day then a bottle would only last me about a week! Once a day works fine. I use nizoral quite irregularly, mostly only when my dandruff gets bad. I take multivitamins too, dunno if they make much of a difference. As for alt drugs, well I'm lucky that I am a good responder to the big three, but if I wasn't, I'd probably take saw palmetto, topical spironolactone and pretty much any androgen blocker I could finasteride. If your body can't handle lower DHT, then you've got to stop DHT from binding with the hair follicle receptors. As far as I'm aware though, the effectiveness of topical AR blockers is much less than that of finasteride, so you'd want to combine as many as possible to see good results. I'd throw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem.
Armando, yeah I did. My consultant (a hair transplant surgeon) told me today that DHT strips the colour from your hair as well as causing increasing thinness, so my blond locks are getting progressively darker, so funnily enough, my Golden Mane is becoming less golden as it improves!
drgs, I didn't take the photos, my doctor at HRBR (Hair Restoration Black Rock in Dublin) takes really good photos at every check up under high lumen lights and in the same positions, so I have him to thank. Very responsible doctors there, they won't perform a hair transplant on anyone until they've been on finasteride for 2 years.
Big Texas, I use the liquid. Even when my hair was thin, I still couldn't get the foam past the hair on on my scalp, and I couldn't stomach taking a bic to my head! The liquid (using the dropper) gets under the hair so it gets good scalp contact. I used spectral UHP for a while, but it's a bit expensive for me, good stuff though. Kirkland stuff works just fine though, and it's cheap!