Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2017, and its treatment options, prices (about €2,000 for a trip with hotel and surgery) and its statement that surgery is the only way to regrow lost hair reflect 2016-2017. This article is not medical advice. Talk to a doctor before starting any hair-loss treatment.
When it comes to stopping hair loss, you’ll usually find countless methods and products being sold as the solution. For years, a big business has grown up around this problem, which affects a large part of the population, especially men.
The problem is that these methods rarely work. When it comes to preventing and stopping hair loss, there are probably only four effective methods, according to Dr. William Yates, a baldness specialist and hair transplant surgeon.
But if what you want is for hair to grow back where you’ve already lost it, Dr. Yates is blunt: nobody ends up with more hair as they get older, and where you’ve already lost hair, it doesn’t regenerate. No shampoo, diet or lotion can achieve that.
Admittedly, some pills and lotions can make hair grow again in areas where you’ve lost it, but as soon as you stop the treatment, you’ll lose it again. And you can’t stay on a treatment for the rest of your life.
Fortunately, science has moved on, and today it is possible to get your hair back. In fact, there’s only one way to do it, and that way is surgery. So let’s take it step by step.
The only valid methods to stop or prevent hair loss (not to make hair grow back)
If your aim is to prevent baldness or to slow down a process that has already become noticeable, the only real methods, according to Dr. Yates, are these:
Propecia, or finasteride
A pill that can prevent hair loss by blocking the type II 5-alpha reductase enzyme, which is what causes baldness.
Rogaine, or minoxidil
As well as capsules, it now also comes as a lotion and a foam, and it has proved to be a good drug for reducing hair shedding. It is not without side effects, including hair growing in unwanted places, but these usually go away when you stop the treatment.
Laser light therapy
Red light is used to stimulate the growth of the hair follicle, reducing inflammation and keeping it healthy.
PRP (platelet-rich plasma) injections
A little blood is drawn, enriched with platelets and injected into the scalp, where it goes directly to the hair follicle and stimulates its growth.
“If you turn on the TV or open a magazine, you’ll find thousands of products that are supposed to make your hair grow, but these are probably the only four things I know of that have any scientific basis for preventing hair loss,” Dr. Yates says in an interview with Business Insider.
He also advises against putting much faith in vitamin supplements that claim to tackle the cause of hair loss, because hardly anyone is deficient enough in vitamins to lose their hair. Will taking vitamins hurt you? “Probably not,” says Yates, but it isn’t effective.
The only way for bald men to get their hair back
With all that said, the only effective way to put hair back where it has gone is a surgical hair transplant.
Hair transplants are now the new business, and in some countries clinics are even combining them with holidays. In other words, you book a trip for around €2,000 with the hotel included and have the surgery while you’re there. But you need to be careful and ask for references about which clinic or surgeon will carry out the procedure.
This surgery basically consists of taking hair from the sides or the back of the head (hair that isn’t “destined” to fall out through baldness) and transplanting it to the areas where we want to get hair back. And this hair won’t fall out, because it is genetically different.
There are several methods of hair transplant surgery. The one Dr. Yates uses is follicular unit extraction. That is, he extracts only individual hairs, and what he does is essentially grow them in the areas where we have lost hair.
It’s simply moving the hair you already have to different parts of the scalp.
The good news about this treatment is that the transplanted hair won’t fall out like the rest of the hair affected by baldness, since hair loss is not a problem of the scalp but of the hair follicle. In 90% of cases, the treatment is effective and permanent.
Depending on the case, the surgeon may consider not doing it hair by hair and opting instead for longer strips, which could leave a few small, barely noticeable scars.
Surgeons who perform scalp transplants do warn that the results are not immediate: the newly transplanted hair can take around 3 to 4 months to grow, and it could take 6 to 8 months to see the full results.
They also warn that in younger people, even though the transplanted hair wouldn’t fall out, the rest of their remaining hair would keep falling out, so for a young person a “hair-by-hair” transplant is probably not feasible.
Featured image: Auckland Museum, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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