JayMan said:
dont make us all out to be like taug. just because most of us are on medication doesn't mean that we all count the hairs in our hairline or whatever or make daily posts crying about it like taug
I know only some of the guys here are specifically like that, but the helpless attitude seems pretty universal. Anything less than a Norwood 1 looks like "sh*t" to them. They've got such a bitter pill in their stomachs.
i like your posts here and i like them over on the Sly site, but i think it's a general attitude of guys who shave their heads because of male pattern baldness to decry the drugs and treatments as generally worthless and ineffective over time when studies prove you wrong. Someone who shampoos with Nizoral twice a week and takes Avodart every day can expect to maintain the hair that they have for 20 years, with a continuous SLOW, SLOW decline after that.
Is there anyone who has taken Avodart and Nizoral for 20 years that you can compare to, and what are the odds that they would also be good responders? My attitude is the treatments are worthless if they're all you've got--as in, your self-image and confidence are based entirely on your hair count. Treating hair loss and obsessing over hair loss are different things, and if you're the former and not the latter, that's cool.
NW4, 5, 6 and 7 are no longer certainties for people with gene coding for those. If they get on Propecia/Proscar or Avodart early enough, they can keep the vast majority of their hair for the rest of their life.
There is no evidence of this. We don't even know what the long-term consequences of systemic DHT inhibitors are. There are guys who have enough trouble with Propecia after a couple of weeks; I can't imagine after 20 years, especially if they're not even good responders to the treatment. There is no magic regimen that's going to let all of you keep your hair at age 50. This is what I meant about false hopes. If all these treatments worked perfectly, nobody here would be going bald.
Hair cloning will almost certainly be here by then or people can just get conventional transplants, of which the techniques are quite good.
Sure, if you're willing to spend a ton of money and endure multiple sessions. Hair cloning is still years off, and even then it'll be a first-generation solution that won't look as natural. It'll take another five to ten years to truly refine it, and by then every guy here will be at least 30 years old. The price won't have come down much either because we're talking cell storage and manual follicle placement.
So I've addressed the medical treatment myths propagated by most male pattern baldness shavers but the other side of it is the myths about conventional hair transplants. I see these guys around on sites like Sly talking about how transplants are pluggy looking and people can spot them from miles away- uh, NOT if you go to a TOP DOCTOR like Armani or Hasson and Wong or someone like that.
How many folks here do you think have the money and transportation to travel to a top doctor and obtain enough grafts to mask their hair loss? Then you still have to maintain it with treatments so that your natural balding doesn't go past the transplant and require another session. All that plus a nice scar on your head. It just seems like too much of a hassle.
So i like your attitude and i respect the fact that you accepted your baldness by shaving your head, but you shouldn't have to lie or just be ignorant in general of the effectiveness of the drugs/topicals on the market right now.
I haven't lied. For me, the negatives outweight the positives. Whether or not I naturally go bald, I like not caring either way, especially with all the money I save.
And i think it's funny that you guys all talk about the nasty side effects of these drugs. Well I've been on Avodart for 8 months and I still can have sex 3 times a day or masturbate 7 times a day without a problem. Sexual sides would have certainly manifested themselves by now.
But that's you. I couldn't even use Rogaine foam without getting headaches, heart palpitations, and freakishly long eyebrows and eyelashes. I didn't want to touch finasteride. None of this stuff is a magic bullet. It's all trade-offs I'm not willing to make for something that matters so little, especially since I love being bald.
Here I'll even show you some pics to prove that your talk about shaved/buzzed people lookiong as good as they did with hair is BS. Here's pics of me with my hair buzzed to 1/2 inch(4 guard) in the first pic and in the second pic, 1/8 inch(1 guard).
Hmm I wonder which looks better?
I know you disagree, but the buzzed looks better to me. You have a good head and face shape. Most of the guys here who claim they look bad with short hair haven't actually asked anybody else what they looked like! They've just decided they looked bad when they actually looked good. It's all mental.