In the first place, the hair loss treatment options can be divided into surgical and non-surgical therapies. Although there are only a few surgical techniques used these days, the non-surgical spectrum is wide and confusing. There seem to be tons of non-surgical treatment options available to those who wish 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 frequently used in alternative hair loss remedies.
The non-surgical, hair restoration 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. Irrespective of the aforementioned breakdowns, hair growth treatments work either by blocking the activity of dihydrotestosterone, also called antinandrogens, or by stimulating hair growth. Some treatments claim to work by different other modes of action such as nourishing the hair follicles or cleaning the scalp but such claims sound quite anecdotal.
Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is a biologically-active metabolite of the male hormone testosterone that is held to be the main culprit causing both, male and female hereditary pattern baldness. Harmful effects of DHT lead to hair miniaturisation as the hair becomes finer and thinner with every new hair growth cycle until the hair follicles refuse to produce another hair at all. The exact mechanism by which DHT acts on hair follicles is not known, though. Medicinal drug finasteride, better known under its trade name Propecia, is the only clinically-proven and FDA-approved antiandrogen used for treating male pattern baldness. It acts by preventing the creation of DHT in the scalp. Since the introduction of Propecia, numerous other drugs and natural therapies have emerged claiming antiandrogen activity and positive influence on hair growth. Some of them are supposed to work by a different mode of action than Propecia, such as preventing DHT from binding to the receptor sites in the follicle or blocking activity in the androgen receptor itself.
A potassium channel opener - 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 of their action 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 versus those in the resting 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 often described as safe alternatives to 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 baldness. Of those few existing, all happen to be medicinal drugs. Natural hair loss treatments have still to live up to their promoter’s claims.
Despite the great variety of available remedies, meaningful hair loss treatment options seem to be relatively few. When deciding about the most suitable hair loss treatment option, one should consider approaching the problem from different angles. It is best advised to use a combination of antiandrogen and hair growth stimulant, such as a Propecia/Rogaine combo. Alternative, hair loss treatments, for instance natural remedies, should mainly be considered as a method of fine-tuning this basic regimen in order to achieve additional benefits.
