Many women and men spend huge amounts of money to treat heavy hair loss or baldness, but in vain, as many dermatologists see, who say that these expensive treatments flirt with dreams without achieving them.
But some doctors, according to a report published by the newspaper “The New York TimesThey believe that an old remedy for baldness can give better results, as it is taken orally in very low doses instead of topical use.
And that treatment is minoxidil, which was traditionally used as a spray or lotion placed on the scalp with the aim of stimulating hair growth, and it is considered to have a strong effect on people under the age of 40 years.
As for the way it works, it stimulates the expansion of blood vessels in the scalp, and this in itself improves the function of hair follicles, as it stimulates hair growth in the scalp.
And Professor and Chair of the Department of Dermatology at George Washington University, Dr. Adam Friedman, believes that taking minoxidil in pill form orally in very low doses gives amazing results for patients who do not benefit from topical treatment or suffer from bad side effects such as rashes.
The head of the department of dermatology at Emory University School of Medicine, Robert Swirlik, agrees with him, who says that the fact that the new method has not been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration does not mean that it is not useful or credible.
“I tell people that there are a lot of unintentional treatments that we use effectively to treat conditions such as pigmentation disorders, inflammatory skin disorders and relentless itching.”
Among the practical experiments that proved the “efficacy” of the new recipe, what happened with a professor of dermatology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Rodney Sinclair, who had a patient who suffers from female pattern baldness and has only very thin hair.
She explains that her patient, Rogaine, developed an allergic rash due to the topical use of minoxidil, and at the same time she could not prevent herself from using it so that her hair would not become thin again.
“If a patient has an allergy due to topical use, one known way to bypass this is to give the same drug orally in low doses,” Sinclair continues.
To do this with her patient, Rogaine, Dr. Sinclair cut the minoxidil pills into quarters, and the result is surprising as her hair is thicker and more manageable.
Then the doctor proceeded to reduce the dose more and more until he reached the effective dose by one forty of the pill, so that taking this medicine became a routine matter for that patient and has been consistent with it until now.
At a meeting in Miami in 2015, Sinclair reported that low doses of minoxidil helped 100 women following Rogaine in a row.
Sinclair published those results in 2017, noting that rigorous studies are needed, with some patients being randomly assigned to take minoxidil and others to sugar pills, but this has not happened yet.
The doctor explains that she has been able to treat more than 10,000 patients with the same method so far.
Recently, an increasing number of dermatologists have started giving low-dose pills to patients with male and female hair loss, which is normal with age.
He’s beginning to see “more popularity in using the new prescription at medical conferences where we share our success stories,” said dermatologist Krystal Ogheh, a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
He cautioned that doctors who do not specialize in hair loss “will not be aware of the usefulness of oral minoxidil.”
But Aguh warned that the drug would not be effective in treating severe baldness cases, especially in men, adding: “It is an ideal treatment for people who are not completely bald, and who notice that they lose hair significantly before they develop intermittent baldness.”
Without rigorous studies, the Food and Drug Administration will not give its approval to the new treatment, and therefore it will most likely remain unintentional, even though the treatment is very cheap and its trial will not cost much, according to the words of some doctors.
However, some patients who take low-dose minoxidil notice stray hair growth on their face and chin.
So some dermatologists, including Sinclair, have added very low doses of spironolactone, a blood pressure medication that also blocks the activity of certain sex hormones called androgens, to prevent unwanted hair growth.