Hairloss communities generally have a lot of active members who are non-responders and/or side-effect-sufferers. You should always keep that in mind when researching treatments.
Thanks, Jim. I actually finally did quite a bit of reading after my post yesterday on all of the positive accounts of finasteride usage and took the leap and swallowed my first half dose, or .5mg yesterday. Baby steps. Also hit Costco and loaded up on some Kirkland Minoxidil 5%, so I've begun a regimen that now includes the two FDA-approved heavy hitters in the anti-hairloss war we're all fighting. (Not that FDA-approval means much since the trial results the FDA reviews are provided BY the pharma companies themselves.)
Fortunately, my shedding only began 5 months ago, and while I can
feel my hair has thinned when I run my hands through it, I've only begun to
see my hairline recede in the past month or so. Still consistently ~50 hairs/day in the shower and my pillow looks like the floor at a barber shop, but I'm hoping I'm early enough to hold things off a while longer. I'm 35 and have always had thick hair, so I'm not ready to say goodbye yet and so suddenly like this. To confirm it hasn't been all in my head, I had a biopsy taken from my crown that confirmed my suspicion of male pattern baldness with 27 of the 46 hairs in the sample being vellus. Aside from picking hairs off my hands in the shower since last November, I
do still have hair on my head so some close to me have scoffed it off as nothing to worry about.
With both grandfathers bald as an eagle and a piece of my scalp cut from my head that points to male pattern baldness, I don't think I can take any chances. But, by "not taking chances", I'm literally taking chances with finasteride. For every story I've read of regret for having not started finasteride sooner, I've read stories from men who wish they could go back and never take it. So, like all who still have some, I'm hoping the this Dr. Brotzu lotion, or other topical finasteride treatments in development that claim to keep the finasteride from entering the bloodstream, come to market soon AND WORK so I can retire the oral finasteride part of my regimen as soon as possible.
Does make me curious, though, when and how the rest of you discovered your hair didn't have plans to stick around for the long run....Just glad there are communities like this one for men in all stages of hairloss, who are sharing their stories of success and failure with the myriad products available out there that claim to be the cure to that which ails us. I don't know if this lotion, or one of the several other "promising" treatments on the horizon, will be the safe and effective solution we're looking for, but I do know through community we'll all know it when someone finds it, FDA-approval or not. Good luck to all!