Hair Loss Diagnosis

Adhering to certain principals is a must if you want your hair loss therapy to be successful. The first thing you should do before you start looking for a suitable hair loss treatment is to determine whether you are a hair loss sufferer at all and what type of hair loss you are suffering from. For male patients who have already lost a substantial portion of their hair on the top and front of their head, it is easy to self-diagnose. But if you are suffering from diffuse hair loss or your hair loss began only recently, you need to go and see a dermatologist. It would be senseless to treat a condition that does not exist. It is very common for hair loss patients to skip the doctor’s consultation while many others simply deny their condition. This very often leads to hair loss progressing too far for it to be treated successfully. In order to regrow hair you must have fine miniaturised hair left in your balding areas. Once your hair follicles have died and there is no baby hair left, no miracle can rejuvenate them.

Once you have determined which type of hair loss you are suffering from, the journey can begin. Whether you intend to follow you doctor’s advice or experiment with your own treatments, you must have realistic expectations. False hopes necessarily lead to frustration, no matter how effective the treatment is. Do not believe that there is a hair loss remedy that can re-grow all of your lost hair. You will be lucky to find a treatment to arrest your balding process and if you manage to re-grow a few hairs, take it as a bonus. Keep in mind that the ‘before and after’ pictures on promotional websites are forged. The best possible improvement one can expect from any treatment is to re-grow the hair you have lost in the previous three years.

Many patients fail to follow professional advice of using proven treatments and instead opt for allegedly safer natural remedies, as they get scared off by the potential negative side-effects of medicinal drugs. This is a common trick used by the shrewd marketers of hair loss scams - to spread stories exaggerating the harmful side-effects of proven medicinal drugs. They lure you into buying their own alternative product, which is most likely a waste of your time and money. Starting with unproven remedies deprives you of the opportunity to test some of the best hair loss treatments available today.

The key to any successful treatment is, besides picking the right remedy, adherence to the prescribed daily regimen. Many people, in their impatience, fail to follow their doctor’s instructions and start experimenting with two or more different treatments simultaneously. This often leads to abandoning certain treatments before they have started producing results. Any hair loss treatment requires a minimum of four months to kick in and you should give it at least six months to deliver measurable results. Overdosing will not speed up or improve results.

And finally, do not overreact to shedding. Shedding is common in any effective hair regrowth therapy. If you start a new treatment, such as minoxidil, you will first have to shed the old hair. Minoxidil stimulates hair follicles, resulting in an increase in the thickness of your miniaturised hair. But this will not happen overnight. First, the old thin miniaturised hair must be shed, and then the hair follicles rearrange themselves and start producing hair that is thicker in diameter. Typically, the first indication that the treatment is working is accelerated hair loss.

We can divide hair loss treatment options into dihydrotestosterone (DHT) blockers, also called antiandrogens, and hair growth stimulants. Considering methods of application, they can be split into oral treatments, topicals and others, such as laser therapy. And lastly, hair loss treatments can be broken into medicinal treatments and natural treatments.

The hair loss treatment options can be surgical and non-surgical. Although there are only a few surgical techniques currently used, the non-surgical spectrum is wide and confusing. There seem to be arrays of non-surgical treatment options available to those who want to avoid hair surgery. Propecia and Rogaine might be the best known medicinal hair loss treatments, while dried fruits of saw palmetto and a Chinese herb, He Shou Wu, also known as Fo-Ti, are the natural ingredients most often used in alternative hair loss remedies.

Furthermore, the non-surgical hair loss therapies can be broken down into medicinal and alternative treatments, whereas when considering methods of application, they can be divided into oral treatments, topicals and others, such as LaserComb or scalp exercise. Irrespective of the aforementioned breakdowns, hair growth treatments work either by blocking the activity of dihydrotestosterone, also called antiandrogens, or by stimulating new hair growth.

Minoxidil, also known under its trade name Rogaine, is the best-known hair loss medicine amongst hair growth stimulants. It is assumed that hair growth stimulants work by directly stimulating epithelial growth of hair follicles and some of them may also counteract the hardening of the hair follicles but the exact mechanism has never been described. One thing that all hair growth stimulants have in common is their ability to increase the length of the hair growth cycle, thus improving the ratio of hair in the growth phase and to increase the hair’s diameter.

The natural hair loss treatments are in principle assumed to work by the aforementioned modes of action and are usually promoted as safer alternatives than medicinal treatments. There are not too many hair loss treatments out there that have been clinically proven and independently verified to be effective in treating any type of baldness. Of those few existing, all happen to be medicinal drugs. Natural hair loss treatments have still to live up to manufacturer claims.

When deciding about the most suitable hair loss treatment option, one should always think about approaching the problem from different angles. It is best advised to use a combination of antiandrogen and hair growth stimulant, such as a Propecia with Rogaine. Alternative, hair loss treatments, for instance natural remedies, should largely be considered as a method of fine-tuning this basic regimen in order to achieve additional benefits.