Every hair loss ad promises regrowth. I promised the opposite.
What did you tell Mochi Health?
“In women, finasteride is a stabilizer first and a regrower second. The win is the hair you keep. Any new density over the following year is a bonus.”
That was the line for Mochi Health’s explainer. The practice version is on the Southwest Plastic Surgery site.
So what is the drug actually doing?
“It slows down that signal driving the follicle to shrink. It is not a hair-growing medication. It is a mechanism to slow down hair-loss activity and maintain hair growth.”
Who do you put on it?
“It is actually very common in women with female pattern hair loss. I offer it to all postmenopausal women as one of the main preventative means to stop further hair loss. We use it sparingly and with a lot of care in premenopausal women due to pregnancy risks.”
It is not approved for women. Say that part.
“Finasteride is not FDA approved for the treatment of alopecia in women. Yet we know that it works, because it has the same mechanism of action in women who have hair loss due to androgenic alopecia. We use it off-label, and we advise patients that we’re using finasteride off-label, and they understand this use. When we use it in premenopausal women, we do so with a lot of patient education, as this is important, as the medication can cause birth defects if used during pregnancy.”
When does anyone see growth?
“Phase two consists of hair growth. There is a slight, if minimal, growth boost in phase two, but the effects on hair thickness or receding hairline are not fully seen until around 12 months down the road.”
A year. Slight, if minimal. Reset the expectation there.
And the hairline the medication cannot touch?
From a consult this month, in Spanish, rendered in English: “Did you pull your hair back a lot before, in a ponytail or a bun? Sometimes when you do that for many years, the hair suffers and falls out.”
What about the hair she still has?
“Exosomes are little particles that the body itself forms, but inside they have all the growth factors that signal the hair to grow. Like when you cut yourself, all the growth factors go there to fix it, but now we’re doing it artificially, we put them here so the body concentrates on the hair. And it’s giving us very good results.”
And when she wants density?
“So we would take hair from the back, we take it in a strip, so it leaves a scar, but your hair will hide it, and we place the hairs one by one.”
“There is a technique where we take the hair one by one, but to do that we have to shave, and in women that doesn’t make sense, right?”
Keep first. Add second. The surgical half is on agulloplasticsurgery.com.
Ready to Talk?
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