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.
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