Hey folks, apologies if i should have put this in the other forum section.
So as you guys probably know minoxidil is a life long commitment - if a better treatment comes around you have to stay on minoxidil to keep the gains you got on minoxidil.
So we don't know why that is right?
Do other growth stimulants fall right out with cessation?
like melatonin + resveratrol, caffeine, latanaprost, ceti, castor oil etc.
When I say fall out with cessation I mean if one were to use these effectively and take a maintenance drug like finasteride/dutasteride/ru/cb would they fall right out?
With regard to your comment about growth stimulants, I have an anecdote or two.
So this is perfectly concurrent with what happens when you take proven hair growth causing corticosteroids such as mometasone fuorate and betamethasone valerate. It's not that your hair becomes "addicted", it's literally that you're changing your body chemistry or in essence "hacking" your body's function to serve a purpose of increasing hair growth.
In the case of minoxidil, what happens is you increase vasodilation artificially, and also increase prostaglandin e2 levels which facilitate hair growth that your body under unmodified conditions cannot sustain or initiate itself.
Same goes for certain hair growth promoting corticosteroids, only in that case I'm not exactly sure what the method of action is because certain other corticosteroids are in fact not proven to actively induce hair growth and follicle count but those are under conditions of inflammation of the scalp which necessitate intervention with a corticosteroid. Those are the only circumstances where clinical data on their hair growth promoting activity is recorded.
Anyhow, basically what happens is, as with for example estrogen, which I will use, if you withdraw the agent that is inducing the hair growth which your body cannot apparently sustain through it's own operation, you start losing hair again.
The only semi-exception to this is that part of my recovery from hair loss which seemed to be in part inflammatory (although DHT is in itself an inflammation causing agent) - involved using both mometasone and then moving up to betamethasone for about 8 months.
After which I titrated off, I did have a shed, but I didn't go back to nothing, my hair now absent of the horrible angry red scalp inflammation episode in which I lost hair, I did end up recovering it. But I think that amusingly enough was because I was also taking a compound at the time which mitigated DHT (not finasteride) that enabled my body to convert test to estrogen, which is itself a potent anti inflammatory and causes vasodilation not too much unlike minoxidil.
So the TL/DR summary is:
If you remove the agent inducing bodily conditions which increase hair growth, you will see a cessation in hair growth progress, that's just how it be. It's not "addiction" think of it as being analogous to somebody just refusing to fertilize their soil for a while and their plants suffering for it.
