20 Years old, new to hairloss and need pointers/advice

[What]

Slight wall of text warning.


Hello everyone. My name is Victor, I'm twenty years old and I'm from Sweden. I used to have very thick hair not so long ago and when I graduated from gymnasium (high school?) at 18 I would never have thought that I just one or two years down the road would be suffering from hairloss.

Straight after graduation I was sent on my way to do one year of military service and during this period I kept my hair very short and so I wouldn't really have noticed if my hair was getting any thinner at this point. I kept on having a short haircut even after I was done with the Armed Forces but a few months ago I decided I would grow my hair back on a bit lengthier as I was under the impression that the ladies used to like it better . At first I didnt really notice anything "out of order" with my hair but after some time I discovered that the hair on the front of my scalp was getting a lot thinner and the infamous bald spot at the back of the head had become visible. At first this didn't really bother me at all and the thought of hairloss didn't really even cross my mind. I just blamed the new wax I had bought and switched back to my old one and kept neglecting that I was thinning. I thought it would get back to normal but things just kept on thinning and it wasn't really until my own mother asked me if I was loosing my hair that I realized what was actually happening.

Needless to say, I felt like shite and I didn't (don't) know what to do. I just felt depressed as hell and really insecure about the way I looked. I spent that whole night just staring straight into the wall thinking "why me?" and feeling all sorts of pathetic. The next day I told myself to stop being a baby about it and man up. Alright, its happening, I'm loosing my hair, now what can I do about it? I started browsing the net and got completely lost in the jungle of products and methods for "curing" baldness. Thinking most of it was probably bulls*it anyways I shaved my head and tried to look happy the way I was. However, my mother found a hair clinc not far from where I live and I felt that speaking with a real doctor I would probably get offered some better advice than the TV-shop product bulls*hit I had found so far, so I decided to go.

After explaining my problem and having the good doc look at my scalp he explained to me that there are three things that he does for people with hairloss.

1. Hair transplant surgery
2. Finasteride prescription drug
3. Lasertreatment

1. Surgery - He told me pretty much right away that surgery was out of the question since I'm this young (20) and while his clinic does not have a strict age-policy they are very restrictive when it comes to surgery on younger persons. He would rather use operation as a last resort, and I feel this is very sensible. I would not like to jump into surgery headfirst anyways so I'm quite certain about this one.

2. Finasteride - He told me that about 80% of men who take this respond posetively to the drug and he was willing to prescribe it to me. At first I was like "" Sweet, this is it. I can't really hope to get regrowth with this method but I can tolerate the way I look now and probably it will halt my hairloss. That was until he got to the side effects part. I had already read that around 2-3% of the blokes who take this suffer from a decreased libido and some will have troubles having an erection. But he also told me about peoples breasts starting grow and of people who became depressed when they took the drug.


This put me off a bit but I still filled in the papers to have him give me the drug (which I haven't started taking yet). When I got back home I tried to find out more about Finasteride and to my great disappointment I found that it also, from what I've gathered, quite drastically hightens the level of estrogen in the body. I work out a lot and like to keep a fit body. The doc aslo jokingly said that I might become "kinder" after taking the drug. At first I didn't really reflect on this but does this mean that my personality will somewhat alter? Will my temper change? Will I be less agressive and more passive? Is there a real risk my body will be less masculine? I really want to start taking Finasteride to stop my hairloss but not at the cost of all those things that I've mentioned. I wan't to know what really happens when I start taking it and if it can affect the way I look or my performance during demanding pshysical activities. Because I'd rather be bald and semi-proud than sporting two sloppy funbags in the locker room. After all the things I read on the web I went from -> -> ->

3. Laser treatment - He said that if I was really really concerned with side effects I should probably go for laser treatment. The only known side effect is the rapid decrease in size of your wallet. My parents told me that they are willing to pay for this but does it really work? He showed me one of the laser things you put on your head and it looked like something straight out of soviet TV shop. This treatment is very expensive and I don't want to spend my parents hard earned money on something that doesn't work. When I asked him exactly how it worked he explained it in a way that would make it impossible to understand for anyone but a doctor and I didn't really feel that I got something from his explanation there. Any of you guys have experience with this method? Has it worked out or is it just an easy way to make a lot of coin from naive hair lossers?

The clinic I went to seems legit, here is a link to their homepage (http://www.newhairclinic.se/) it is in Swedish but I guess you can run some things in google translate if you want to know what it says. The part where he talks about young people and surgery is if you go to "Operationen --> Ungdomar och håravfall" in the menu at the top of the screen. As I said they seem legit and serious. For example they went to Boston for some yearly "hair transplantation congress" recently, which I guess is quite distant if you have your practice in Sweden.

Anyways, I'd appriciate your opinions on what I should do here, or on the different methods pros and cons. I still feel very insecure about this. Almost like im a young man trapped in an old mans body or something :/

Sorry for my poor English and the wall of text.

[mattj]

Your English is good and you write well enough to make a wall of text tolerable.

Your doctor gave you mostly good advice. You must at least stabilize your hairloss before having transplant surgery at your age.

Now the laser. Well, I think most dismiss the ability of the laser to do anything for hairloss. I'd like to be proven wrong on that though.

The most important thing you've learnt about is the Finasteride. Your doctor was right to inform you of all the possible side effects, and he included some weird and rare ones too. Very few users of the drug develop "sloppy funbags" or any sort of breast tissue. It happens but not too often. I haven't heard of people seeing changes in their temperament and becoming soft and weak. There are all sorts of theoretical effects, rumours and rare experiences which get reported, but remember that those who do just fine on Finasteride are the quiet majority. The most commonly reported side effect is erectile dysfunction, but that too is something that occurs much less than you might believe after searching the internet.
You should try taking the Fin and if you suffer any effects that you can't live with then drop it.

It sounds like the army got you used to having a buzz cut. If all else fails then that's something to fall back on.

[What]

Thank you very much for your response, Mattj. Part of the reason that I've been all worried about this is because of the three year old Swedish documentary about a guy who took Finasteride and that the drug, among other things, made him feel like his pecker is "like a peice of skin and that is it".

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXWVTStnHs

The part where you say "You should try taking the Fin and if you suffer any effects that you can't live with then drop it." is what I thought of doing. It makes the most sense right? But then I read this comment:

"The most insiduous thing about finasteride side-effects are how a lot of people don't notice it at first. If you're only losing about 5% of your libido in a year, you probably won't notice much in the first couple years. Using it long term, though, would be like a death wish. Merck is able to tweak the statistics because most guys don't notice much during that first year, so a huge number of cases go unreported..."

that together with the professor from the Swedish Karolinska Institutet (which is Europe's highest ranked university in Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy. It is the only non-U.S. medical school ranked within the world's top 10, and is Sweden's highest ranked university in all categories) who says that he thinks one should avoid using medications that require prolonged use which can upset the hormon balance.

If the side effects would become visible right away then sure, easy to drop. But what if they'd first become visible after 3 or 4 years? Wouldn't it be harder to "restore" your body to normal?

Sorry if I seem too worried about this and thank you once again for the answer I got. ATM I'm thinking about combining the Finasteride with Laser treatment altough I'm still lacking an explanation as to how and why the latter would work.

[susee]

hiii

hi I am 24 years old.......will it be too early age for the surgical treatment. Even i am feeling loads of guilty with this balded head. Always having a long hair to hide my scalp . I am planning for the surgerical treatment only. But, i dont how reliable it is. how long does the hair stay over our head??.....will it aid in the formation of new root???......

[What]

hi I am 24 years old.......will it be too early age for the surgical treatment. Even i am feeling loads of guilty with this balded head. Always having a long hair to hide my scalp . I am planning for the surgerical treatment only. But, i dont how reliable it is. how long does the hair stay over our head??.....will it aid in the formation of new root???......

Sup mate. Now I don't really know why you are posting in this thread, and since I'm all new to this stuff dont take my advise/word too seriously.

You can't really be too young to do it. What the doctor meant by being too young is that younger persons generally can't consider all the risks with hairtransplants properly. At the clinic I went to he had sort of a scale with like 4 different scenarios or points.

The first one was something like:

1. Your hairloss irritates you and you'd like to know how to cure it, but if no such cure existed you'd easily accept your condition and move on with your life. You do not pass on social activities or get togethers because of your baldness more than rarely.

2. The second point you were a lot concerned with the balding process and mirrors/reflections can cause you to feel really uncomfortable and insecure about yourself. You pass on social activities regularely because of this, hair used to be a big part of your life and perhaps you spend hours trying to fix your hairstyle so that looks like you aren't balding.

3 The third point you had basically let the hairloss run your entire life. You don't go outside at all and so forth.

4 The fourth point was even more extreme, can't remember what was said here.

Like I was a 1-2 so that is probably why he did not recommend surgery to me. And on the website he said that studies has shown that the human brain is not fully capable of weighting and considering all the risks in a realistic way. For example if you make a transplant, you're still going to loose your hair as it is in no way a cure for your condition and thus making a hairtransplant one time is probably agreeing to having to do several more in the future and perhaps you can't afford it then etc etc.

Like if you are a #4 at the list you'd probably be better off going to a psychologist or something imo but if you really let it run your life then sure a hairtransplant might be the way. Just dont expect it to be a cure or nothing, and expect having to do more of them because as you loose hair the original one will look weird.