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It's all presumptuous but I mean, KCMB, people are going to react differently to you. I haven't seen EK. I feel like I get better treatment than most trans folks when I wear my wig.
Exploring The Hormonal Route. Hair=life.
- Thread starter bridgeburn
- Start date
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Yeah, that's true. People see what they wanna see to fit their narratives.
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We can chat but this is a thing where you have to be committed I am afraid and it might not be for you.
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To me, a lot of it has to do with how you see yourself. If you are sort of a top kind of person then maybe Serms are something we can discuss but they cost a lot and are unpredictable.
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Not totally sure I follow what you mean by this.
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EK and KCMB, do you think you can restore a full head of hair without hitting adult female target levels? Just curious but @bridgeburn was sucking on six estradiol pills daily plus estrogel and he used AA's always. My initial quest was to show that topical estrogen on the scalp would restore hair but eh, I am swimming in estradiol after years of low-dose estrogen that went not very far. Oral minoxidil is a Goddess-send too.
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You know. I don't know me. People contact me. Sometimes guys do and I guess I am proud to be convincing as female.
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Depends on how far gone someone is. And bridge used 12mg estradiol pills before?
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I post his protocols all of the time. Let me check.
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@Bridegeburn's Protocols
I try to re-post these frequently since many people seek proven protocols even though all items in a stack are frequently unnecessary:
@bridgeburn Dosage Recommendations:
I am trying to keep up a bit with @bridgeburn's dosing as we know that it will work. He was taking his estrogen sublingually so that means more or less it is three times as potent but has a shorter half-life from what I have read. This is about at his 9 month mark, I think:
.5mg Dutasteride
2.25mg oestrogel topically
2mg estradiol hemihydrate, buccally
50mg cyproterone
10mg oral minoxidil, every other day
In terms of strength, this would be a pretty standard male to female HRT protocol for someone well into transition or maintaining adult female target levels except the CPA is off the charts. This is puzzling because he was doing fine without CPA but he might be struggling with the temples. He cut back on the oral minoxidil because someone alleged that that was causing some/much of his growth. I highly doubt this because the growth he has simply doesn't resemble minoxidil hair growth in its pervasiveness. I don't think anyone is claiming that oral minoxidil on its own could do anything close to his gains. He mentions that oral minoxidil has a short half-life so I am not sure why he didn't just go to 2.5mg twice a day.
He explains that he decreased oral minoxidil dosage due to excessive unwanted hair growth.
On August 25th, 2018, this was his regimen:
Second Cocktail in his own words, dating from late summer to fall of 2018:
1mg dutasteride everyday, 6mg buccal estrofem (a couple times i took 8mg but mostly 6mg a day), 200mg spironolactone, 500mg sulfasalizine, 10mg oral minoxidil every other day and topical minoxidil every other day on alternating days (I don't really measure just cover the area). He also was taking 100 mg of progesterone orally which is a marginal dose. October 2nd, he added one Diane pill per week.
All he really needs in my estimation at this point is the 6mg to 8mg estrofem. The oral minoxidil might be important also but that isn't a hormonal med. He shouldn't need oral minoxidil and sulfasalizine, just one or the other from what I have read as long as a person is using topical minoxidil with the sulfasalizine. I think by this point the spironolactone is largely useless as is the dutatsteride but he doesn't know this because he doesn't test so he can't be sure he is hitting targets, perhaps, without an AA.
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I think sometimes adult female range E may not be enough. Cis women only really have high E2 for a brief period during the menstrual cycle. Estradiol helps a lot because it boosts SHBG too. In general, cis women have too much testosterone compared to what would be needed to substantially regrow significant loss.
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If @bridgeburn didn't exist, I would have to invent him.
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I am coming to that conclusion. There's a reason why cis-guys don't do this. Estrone and Estradiol were discovered around 1930 and people were giving eunuchs estrogen apparently back then so people knew it could regrow hair. But you can't get in and out easily. Noah is trying. I talk a lot about being captured by the experience.
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I'm not sure whether super high E levels provide any greater effect than moderate levels longterm. Estrogen increases the time in anagen phase, so obviously hair will be thicker since more will be growing at any given time. But anytime estrogen levels lower it will cause Telogen Effluvium akin to what happens after pregnancy in women. So unless E lvls stay supraphysiological indefinitely, it might just be temporary improvement
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I was right at the high mark for first trimester pregnancy on my last test so that's where I am keeping things even though my PA said to go back to only one patch. I am not done yet.
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No but there was a one person study from 2016 and that drove my conclusions. Once they gave her spironolactone, she had amazing regrowth from bald scalp. She wasn't meeting target levels and they proposed that that is necessary and that's not cheerful news for our cis friends trying to grow hair.
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For anyone else, doctors were not prescribing enough estradiol because they mostly used Premarin or ethinyl estradiol which can eat up the liver long-term but still the women needed to hit target levels. I keep reiterating that I got big boobs from middling estrogen but not the hair. The hair comes last so it's not fair but I don't want to mislead anyone. spironolactone spoofed higher E2 and lower T and she had amazing regrowth. I post it frequently because it is inspired me and then someone told me about @bridegburn.
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I don't think too much estrogen is needed to stimulate the stem cells in the follicles, but the fact high E increases SHBG and brings the amount of circulating bio-available androgens way down is more important. Estradiol also down regulates the androgen receptor. So does DHT and testosterone, but obviously we don't want to use those.
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I need to inform myself some more regarding SHBG. I used the mirror method for so long that like @bridgeburn I never tested because I could tell that I had larger breasts but the hair improvement was only middling. There was some though from Biestro and I posted yesterday how I actually lost hair when I started HRT @.30 mg Premarin because I was slathering Biestro for six months before that. I need to dump my purchase history on my thread and see if I can figure out my possible levels. I mostly quit for two years and I think that helped/caused the breast growth like priming the pump. I tried to be male for her for two more years post-divorce and then I gave up and entered a formal HRT program.
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I got two trophies today. If I hadn't deleted so much content, it would have been even quicker, lol.