I’d like to share a problem I ran into while trying to stop my hair loss — namely, using finasteride/dutasteride together with minoxidil. I started going bald at 22, and at that point I decided to start using minoxidil in the hope of regrowing the hair I had already lost. I used it every day for a year, but my hair continued to slowly but steadily thin. So I decided to add finasteride to my treatment. I was really surprised by the studies, as well as by people’s stories about how much this medication had helped them save their hair. But the miracle, as I saw it at the time, never happened. After a year of using it, my hair seemed to keep getting worse. Actually, that’s not entirely true: the hair loss had stopped, and finasteride did help me regrow some hair. But after seeing so many people whose hair apparently returned to how it looked before they started losing it, I felt like nothing was working for me. So I decided to switch from finasteride to dutasteride. And even then, I genuinely didn’t see any significant improvement compared with finasteride. At that point, I really felt like none of this was working. I stayed on finasteride/dutasteride + minoxidil for more than three years. Eventually, I got tired of applying minoxidil twice a day, so I decided to stop it and stay on dutasteride alone. At first, everything seemed fine. For the first four months, my hair looked exactly the same as it had before I stopped minoxidil. However, during the fourth month, my hair suddenly started shedding extremely rapidly, and by the fifth month I had lost around 30% of my hair, possibly even more. the condition of my hair went from “well, it’s not that bad” to “holy shit, I literally have no hair.” So I immediately decided to go back on minoxidil. About a month later, the shedding stopped, and another two months later, my hair had returned to roughly the same condition it had been in before I stopped the medication. And now I genuinely understand that my hair had actually been in pretty good shape all along. Because of my unrealistic expectations and low self-esteem, I had convinced myself that nothing was working.

so yes.  it doesn’t work the way I expected or would have liked it to, but it does work. That’s why I’d like to warn anyone who is thinking about stopping their treatment or is getting tired of minoxidil: probably don’t.

  




sharing my experience using Fin/Dut + minoxidil to treat alopecia.