I have insurance but I guess I would just ask them to add these extra things. Seems like there would be a name but I will ask my practitioner. Some people who are Dr. Will Powers's followers get all of these extra levels and hormones checked.
I might try to write some on the "backdoor pathway". It seems like something pretty complicated. I have a week now of Castor Oil of which I was dubious but it is cheap and the taste is bland rather than horrible. One thing is that so many of us have these extended stacks to the point where it can be very difficult to know which med or treatment is doing what. I added oral minoxidil around October 18th of last year and I was already having good progress before then and it seemed great and now I am adding Castor Oil. Everything seems to be working together well.
I think that we all need to monitor our Vitamin D levels especially because of being indoors so much but I can't link Vitamin D to hair restoration that I have seen. If we go through the fora, people are often mentioning different vitamins and phytochemicals, zinc for example but most of our daily vitamins have zinc and Vitamin D.
A lot of this is easier from an MtF point of view because we can usually tell if we are re-masculinizing. I have never bothered about DHT levels because dutasteride and finasteride worked so well for me before I added MtF HRT meds.
I think that for cis-guys, slow titration is key and to keep monitoring any unwanted body effects. Assuming my protocol works, I have posted three different protocols, with the two main ones by
@bridgeburn that I believe could work for most people if they have the inclination. But it all seems to come back to sheds. If sheds are only benevolent some of the time and riding them out doesn't appear to work or be a solution for other reasons, then we are flailing a bit, which I already noticed on the
@bridgeburn thread. So many folks were shedding and two people contacted me that they couldn't manage their shedding on pretty much any of the hormonal meds, including minoxidil and duta.
I am puzzled and frustrated for these folks. I continue to monitor MtF fora for clues but we can pretty much throw the kitchen sink at the baldness issue. I loved Bi-estro and would still use it on my face and hair although I prefer pure estradiol and the OTC estradiol product has about 7 days worth for me.
If any form of estrogen works for a person on the scalp and/or face for MtF's then keep doing what works and titrate gradually. My main worry for you is that I spent a lot of time in the salt mines, almost four years doing DIY mostly with Biestro. A couple of times I bought Estrogel, Premarin and spironolactone online but I didn't know about all of the off-shore sources back then. If you look at my pics on the hair and transition blog, I do think there were visible improvements but I could still see my incipient bald spot under bad lighting and my other improvements were barely cosmetically significant even in a male context.
I will see about maybe talking some about Bayesian Analysis and how that can inform people looking for a protocol. That's my main goal, to establish protocols where Joe Schmoe can look at say, four different protocols and say, "ah, this is the one with the amount of risk, I am willing to take". There are also issues with banking sperm. Anyone contemplating having children soon should bank sperm, even though all of this seems largely reversible except for breast grouwth.
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