After finishing my last chemotherapy cycle in August 2016, my hair was taking a long time to grow back. My hairline also seemed to have taken a hit from the treatment. I decided to see if I could speed things up a bit and did a little research into hair growth. Two main products seem to produce real results in fighting baldness and increasing hair growth: Minoxidil and Finasteride.
For my case, I never seriously considered Finasteride (sold as Propecia). While effective, the drug has some potentially nasty side effects that I did not want to risk. That left me with Minoxidil (aka rogaine). Minoxidil works by increasing the blood flow to hair follicles. In areas where the hair is thinning, minoxidil should cause the thin hair to fail out and be replaced by thicker hair growth. Some people may go through a period of "shedding" where the thin hairs are all failing out before the new hairs grow in. Because my hair was so short to start with, I did not notice any shedding.
I picked up a 3 month supply of the generic foam from Walmart and started applying it twice a day. I applied it to my hairline and also to the crown of my head. The label says to only apply to the crown of your head, but I had read online that it can be used on the hairline as well. The picture below shows the before and after for the 3 month trial.
Three months is about how long the minoxidil takes to start working. You can judge for yourself, but I think the minoxidil definitely helped. While using the foam, I did not notice any side effects. In the end, I decided not to continue the experiment. $30 for a three month supply is not too bad, but having to apply twice a day was inconvenient. I'll be interested to see how my hair holds up now that I have stopped. I'm not sure how much of the hair growth can be attributed to minoxidil and how much is just due to more recovery from the chemo. Either way, I wanted to upload some before and after pictures for anyone else thinking about hair loss/growth.
This was my first post in several months. For those of you that had been following my story, I'll try to have some updates this week on where and what I have been up too. A lot has happened so far in 2017.
