Episode 9: Dr Harrison Weisinger discusses all things prescription medication for hair loss and more!

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr Harrison Weisinger (B.Sc., M.Sc., MB.BS, PhD) to discuss the prescription medication that is available for hair loss.
Dr Harrison has been with Gro since the very start, first prescribing and being a point of contact to becoming Medical Director of our online services and now COO.
With his vast knowledge and experience within the medical industry, he plays a major role in developing the services that we provide.
He also has his own hair loss experience to share, he understands the frustration that men go through and so he is able to relate.
Whether it's the side effects that you're worried about or you're wondering what the medications actually do, Dr Harrison covers it all, and how Gro's Prescription Hair Care service can help you!

OUR HAIR TRANSPLANT CLINICS:

AUSTRALIA:
Gro - Melbourne Clinic
Address: Level 1/893 Collins St, Melbourne, VIC, 3008, AU
Phone: 03 9081 5868

Gro - Sydney Clinic
Address: Level 3/80 Williams St, Sydney NSW, 2011, AU
Phone: 02 9194 0140

Gro - Brisbane Clinic
Address: Level 1/135 Wickham Terrace, Brisbane, QLD, 4000, AU
Phone: 07 3147 8174

Gro - Gold Coast Clinic
Address: 178 Ashmore Rd, Gold Coast, QLD, 4217, AU
Phone: 07 5625 3399

Regen by Gro - Pacific Fair Clinic
Address: Pacific Fair Shopping Centre, Shop 1502, Broadbeach Waters QLD 4218, AU
Phone: 07 5593 8360

Gro - Perth Clinic
Address: Suite 2/216 Stirling Hwy, Perth, WA, 6010, AU
Phone: 08 9289 6825

NEW ZEALAND:
Gro - Auckland Clinic
Address: Level 1/96B Carlton Gore Road, Newmarket, Auckland 1050, NZ
Phone: +64 9 870 1760

Transcript

Opening Remarks
Hello everybody and welcome to the Grow Diary podcast where we will take you on a journey breaking down stigmas, myths and misconceptions of all things hair loss. We'll have some discussions with people in the industry as well as clients and we'll share their experiences and journeys of hair loss, leading you to the ultimate destination of hair regrowth. Hi everybody and welcome to the Gro Diaries podcast with myself Andy and Marc here as always. I'm glad to have you with us for this episode I'm going to make this Gro Diaries podcast a big win in 2023. I'm going to take Joe Rogan But now we've got some very good guests scheduled for this year, starting with our very own Dr. Harry Weisinger. It's good to have you with us today, we really appreciate your time. Very, very busy man at the time so I appreciate that and Marc as always with us. Hello, it's hard for us to probably introduce Dr Harrison as there's a lot to unpack. You're a very compact person Dr Harry. Do you want to give us a little bit of overview about who you are, what you've done and what

Introduction to Dr Harry Weisinger

you do for Gro initially, So Im the Chief Operating Officer for Gro  but this is a new role for me which I took on just at the end of last year. Prior to that I was heading up the prescription hair care side of Gro and prior to that I working in two roles one of which was one of the doctors working in Gro, consulting with patients that were interested in medication as a solution for hair loss and hair regrowth, but also as a strategic advisor to the company, a role that I did for about four years. My background is pretty schizophrenic, complicated, not going to use up the whole episode telling you about what I've done, but I'm a doctor. I trained as a GP.

I've had a special interest in hair and a special interest in high performance medicine historically.

Most of my time now is not any of those things. I'm working to improve Gro and

how we do things, improve the experience for customers and make it a better business. Beautiful. That was the most understated entrance for someone of your skill level that you could possibly do but you also are trained in hair transplants You dabbled in that and you've had hair transplants yourself. I have. And you've probably done most things that we could probably name in and around the medical field. Been a professor.

Yes.

Taught, owned Spec savers. Yes.

Drove Spec Savers to places that they probably wouldn't have gone without you, yeah?

I would like to think so, yeah.

Globally, yeah.

And so, right, so today's episode we really want to kind of get into the nuts and bolts of prescription hair care as such. We'll talk about hair transplants and your personal experience and so on and so forth as we go through, but around prescription hair care there's a lot of misinformation or what is the right word, sort of stretches of truth about what it does and what it doesn't do. Some of that comes from marketing departments at other companies. Some of that comes from angry people on the internet. Let's start with Finasteride.
 
 What does Finasteride do?

Can you give us a really quick, basic rundown of what it does. Sure. So what Finasteride does is it blocks the production of a hormone called dihydrotestosterone or DHT. DHT in turn has some important functions in the body, some functions which are poorly understood, but it's definitely active with respect to skin function and hair function and hair growth. And as it turns out there's about 50% of men and maybe 20 up to 25% of women are susceptible to genetic hair loss. And this is largely related to hair follicles being sensitive to DHT. In this case, the case of genetic hair loss, DHT causes hair to fall out and stop growing. Finasteride, by reducing the production of DHT can delay and in many cases reverse this genetic susceptibility to hair loss. You mentioned the misinformation. This is not different to any misinformation or misunderstanding when it comes to medicine and certain treatments and certain illnesses. Unfortunately, we haven't got to the point where Google is a good substitute for science and medicine. And it could be quite a while before we get to that point.

Are you saying Dr Google is not a real doctor?

Yeah, look, I don't know. I mean, there's some real information on Google, but there's a lot of garbage as well. And it's, you know, for the unsuspecting non-expert, it's impossible to decipher what's real and what isn't. Finasteride, and its purported or real side effects are the perfect example. Now there's any number of posts on Reddit and so forth that discuss the side effects to Finasteride. It's because people are so passionate about their hair as they should be.

Yeah.
 
 Common Side Effects of Finasteride

It's a very heavily searched topic. Yeah. very heavily searched topic. You know, how do I stop my hair falling out? Okay, and because Finasteride is one of the most effective treatments, it's one of the most talked about things in respect of hair loss. There's a very interesting observation the more someone reads about the side effects of Finasteride, the more likely they are to get side effects. Okay, and this is really quite interesting as a phenomenon because you'd think that the side effect rate is the side effect rate, but it actually depends on how pre-loaded with information the individual is. If they take the drug thinking there's a high chance they're going to get side effects, well guess what? They're going to get side effects. Which puts the doctor in a really difficult position because you have to talk about side effects but you know at the same time you don't want to over-egg that pudding because then this poor guy is going to get side effects. The published side effect rate for Finasteride is something around 1%. So one in a hundred guys will have some side effects to Finasteride. The side effects are well known, commonly talked about on Reddit, and because they are sexual in nature, they're really bloody important as well. So there are many men that aren't willing to have their libido reduced, aren't willing to give it a try, but the reality is the chance of getting side effects is so low, its worth a shot. If you do get side effects, we can adjust the dose, we can adjust the form, we can cease

the drug if we have to. Sexual functioning I guess is the most important part of that conversation for a lot of people, right? It is worth noting that people who don't take medication and it's men's health and as a doctor you probably understand this a little bit better, but men who are stressed, men who are you know burnt out also struggle with sexual function, right? It is something

that is not uncommon in today's society, which is why there's a lot of businesses popping up that are typically designed for sexual health function. Yeah I think it's worth saying that not all sexual side effects are equal. There's a very important distinction in that when Finasteride does actually cause side effects, it is almost always a reduction of libido. So you're less motivated to have sex. It's very rare for it to be erectile dysfunction, ejaculatory dysfunction, whatever. These are less common. So as I said, you're probably better off trying Finasteride and if you don't get side effects, carry on. And if you do, then we tweak the dose depending on the severity of the side effect. Like if the poor guy goes, look, I got no interest in sex and this is really bad, you know, because my partner or my wife or whatever.

Logger Robbie.

Right, that's right.

He's scratching the walls.

And it's a bad situation. Then you've got to do something about that. But that's really, in my experience, really rare. I was, you know, if I had to guess, I would say half a percent of my patients at Gro would have experienced side effects and the majority of those were mild and were ameliorated with a reduction of the dose or a change from oral, which is by far the most effective way to take Finasteride, to topical.

Yeah, and one of the other big things that come up is people think that it reduces their testosterone level and for some reason, I mean I don't know if it's a phase that men, young men are going through, a lot of people seem to be taking extra testosterone, it seems to be
 
 Effects of Testosterone

a bit of a thing at the moment where you know for whatever reason they're going to doctors or finding places to increase their testosterone? Good question. So the enzyme that Finasteride blocks is the enzyme that converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone. So by blocking that enzyme, if anything, you are increasing testosterone because it backs up. Instead of being converted into DHT, it's not. So there it is as testosterone. So paradoxically Finasteride will actually do nothing or increase testosterone. That is to say that - Look, we see plenty of men that are active at the gym, perhaps supplementing with additional testosterone either through a doctor or through their mates at the gym. And they're worried that Finasteride is going to undo all the benefit of taking the testosterone. It absolutely doesn't. On the other hand, by taking extra testosterone, you are putting more through that pathway to make more DHT. So if you don't take Finasteride and you are taking testosterone, you're almost certainly going to lose hair if you're susceptible to it, which is why you see just so many bald, just...

Is that almost like speeding up the process? It is speeding up the process.

By making more testosterone. 100%. And so I guess the biggest take out from that is what is DHT good for? Because at the start of that you said that it had its functions. So what are we reducing in function that DHT is good for in the body. So what it does is it's switchin on and off certain genes in the skin and in the hair and quite probably in the testes and other things. So it's an important regulator of the function of those organs, hair and skin, other parts of the body. Its best known function is actually hair and skin. The function that's driven by DHT is based on your genetics. So in some people, DHT will make them grow hair and in others it will make them lose

hair.
 
 What is the role of DHT?

I can't give you the perfect scientific answer about what DHT is good for. The fact that some people get sexual dysfunction suggests that in some people it's important for sexual function. That's all I can tell you. It's just too complex, poorly understood at the moment. And I think the priority has been figuring out DHT's role in hair loss because it's such a good target for slowing or even reversing to some extent hair loss in men and probably in postmenopausal women as well. And so on that, people who are losing hair that don't understand Finasteride or don't want to take finasteride, what does a hair transplant look like for those people? Yeah that's a good question. So as no doubt you've discussed in many podcasts, the hair transplant process takes hair follicles from the back of the scalp which are by definition not susceptible to DHT and transplanting them to the part of the scalp that's lost hair or is losing, continuing to lose hair, those hairs won't fall out. So certainly not due to DHT anyway.

Unless you have something like retrograde alopecia where your DHT is affecting your

donor area as well.
 
 
 

Dr Harry's Hair Growth Journey
 
Right, right. Okay, but if you're not one of those people. You're implanting hair that's not going to fall out into the central part of the scalp and that hair is good to go, but it's surrounded by hair that is still vulnerable to that original DHT related damage. So what we find is that men that have a hair transplant and they have quite aggressive hair loss, by the time that hair that's been transplanted is growing fully, they've lost a significant proportion of their remaining hair, which gives quite an unsatisfactory result. Now, which is why our recommendation is certainly if you're going to invest in having a hair transplant, if you want to maximise the result, i.e. maximise your satisfaction, go the extra step of taking the medication. So once a day capsule, you know, Gro does a combination of Minoxidil and Finasteride or Minoxidil and Dutasteride in various strengths and just by taking the medication you're defending against further hair loss, potentially even regrowing some hair. You know the other thing I haven't mentioned yet is the studies on Finasteride show up to 25% increase in hair count after two years. So it does reverse, I mean that depending on the nature of hair loss, it will eventually outrun the medication. But the initial results are fantastic. And it should, depending on the person, it should combined with a hair transplant pretty much get you through life. That's certainly my own ambition. Having had hair transplant, medication just improves my hair density, keeps me from losing more hair at the crown, that sort of stuff. Yeah, so as far as, it's always good I think people really resonate with personal stories, your hair loss specifically, what does that journey look like for you? Yeah, so I guess it is different for everyone. I remember, I never, well, I didn't spend much time with my mother's father, but he was bald as a badger, just shiny head bald at a young age. My younger brother was starting to lose hair in his teens, and so I remember when I was at university looking in the mirror after getting out of the shower and seeing my scalp. And being able to actually imagine myself bald. So looking at my wet hair, I can see the surface of my scalp in the well-illuminated bathroom, the light straight down on my scalp, looking in the mirror and the bit that you didn't mention in my background is I wanted to be a rockstar.

I was just going to mention that because you had long hair.

I had long, long hair. Your brother's a rockstar, right? Well, yeah, I mean it depends on who you ask. No I was in a band with my brother and making rock music and that sort of stuff. Because I was doing my PhD also at the time and I'd go to parties and girls would say, so what do you do? And I'd go, oh, I'm doing my PhD in visual neuroscience. And they'd go, oh, I'm just going to go get a drink. So I quickly learned that if I said, oh, I'm a singer in a band, they go, oh really? It's just a much

different experience. So anyway the rock star thing. Yeah, but

not because of the hair. So you started to envision yourself being bald, your hair was starting to thin, what was your next step for them? What sort of time frame we talking - 10 years ago 15 years ago. Yeah this was in my late 20s Couple of years ago. What did I do? Yeah I got, okay, yep thinking back now. Yeah. First step was topical Regain over the counter. Yeah. That's what I did first. That gave me an itchy scalp and ruined every pillowcase I ever owned. Okay, because it was just cheap like the Monoxidil is Monoxidil but the liquid that it comes in is kind of important and that particular preparation was not great for staining pillowcases and stuff. I think I just battled along with that for a while and you know hair loss at that point was present but not particularly disturbing and then it progressed and got more disturbing and then I think in my early to mid-30s I went to see Ashley and Martin. So I met the chap at Ashley and Martin. They sold me a year's subscription for supplements, shampoo and conditioner, saw palmetto, yeah, yeah, saw palmetto, and to come in once a week and get my head lasered. Oh and some topical minoxidil, yeah, their own special blend herbs and spices, topical minoxidil, yeah, and so that was 3 grand and I remember saying to the guy but I was a doctor right? Yeah. Yeah and I said aren't I going to lose my hair anyway like even with all this crazy stuff that you're giving me and he's like well you know like yeah probably but you know we slow it down and the other I'm like shouldn't I just get a hair transplant and he's like well you know you really want to keep using this stuff and I go, yeah, but can you also refer me for a hair? Like sure, I'll pay the three grand, happy to go ahead with that. Because at this point I'm getting desperate and my hairline is marching back and I'm seeing more of my scalp when I'm picturing my grandfather and so forth. and they referred me to Martinick Surgeon, who was doing the FUT surgery. So they had the strip, you know, sort of cut from my scalp at the back. They harvest the grafts from that. Yeah, and I remember having to fly to Sydney or something like that to do it. So it was, it wasn't the best experience but it wasn't the worst. And my hair started growing back. And wow, I mean, it's just, I mean, you guys know, it's f#$ckin amazing getting your hair back. So yes, and then I didn't do any of the aftercare appointments. Yeah. No, I didn't take any medication. I didn't do a checkup. No, can't be bothered. I'm too busy, whatever. Anyway, and then maybe a few years later my hair, you know, my hair loss had progressed a bit more. So I just called Martnick again, went back, had a revision, same process. FUT again. FUT again, they basically cut out the old scar and make a new one. Oh yeah. And that did pretty well and then I joined Grow and this was say five years ago. Yeah. And shortly after, you know, wanting to experience the full journey and understand the business, I had a top up procedure with the regro procedure. So that was a far better experience, even having had the FUT before, they were still able to harvest more hair. And I'm still in with a shot, if I progress a bit more. Yes, there's still a bit of donor there and I would, you know, this is getting a bit technical, but I would happily be over harvested at the back to fill in the gap and I would have tattoos rather than have a bald patch.

So what you're saying is that you probably haven't made peace yet with your hair loss?

No, I wouldn't say so. Look, if I'm being honest, I still use the fibres, okay. It's difficult to actually articulate the real reasons that... I can only talk about me, okay. For sure. I could give you a story about why it's important but it probably isn't the real thing and so Andy and I were talking about this yesterday. I started reading, I started listening to that book. Yeah, yeah, Alchemy, it's a great, it's a great book Rory Sutherland's the author and and it talks about how people even when asked why did you do this the answer they come up with isn't really the motivation it's something deeper. Like there's something about losing your hair that can be devastating and it really can wreck your confidence and on the other hand, having your hair back, it just gives you, it's like wings, right? You can say whatever you like but why would you choose to have no hair when you have hair. It doesn't make any sense. We're born with great hair, right? You go through, it's so cruel, you go through 18 years of age, got hair down my shoulders, listening to Guns N' Roses, and then...

It's a part of who you are.

It is.

It's a part of your identity or personality.

Totally - so like my only suggestions to your
 
 Reasons To Get A Hair Transplant

listenership is be honest with yourself you know about your hair. Yeah because we obviously at Gro and this goes back to like you said we were discussing yesterday goes back to the being you know deeper underlying reasons why people want to get a hair transplant nine times out of ten it's not just to have more hair. No. It's something else in their life and we were talking

about this, you know, how can we communicate with people to try and you know to try and get them you know to discuss this and be open about it and this you know. I think its fears, I think it's fears of being unattractive, even for yourself, for your partner, or for your potential partner. I mean you can't tell me you don't want to be attractive to your partner, right? So if you sense you'd be more attractive with hair, maybe there are guys that are more attractive without hair but I don't know them. Yeah, right. And it could be that. There is something about insecurity, confidence. I think

it's really important to look at your life too. So like we've talked about it before but for me, right, I would describe myself pre-hair transplant as someone who accepted baldness, right, having the situation I grew up in with dad, uncle, his grandfather, right? From a young age kind of knew where I was going, so it was sort of somewhat fatal fortune that led me to get a hair transplant, right? It was the right place, right person, right time. I haven't met, you know, some people from Gro, but I look back back now at pre-hair transplant and spent my life in a way that I didn't see

when I was in it, right? Hiding behind things, avoiding situations, you know, and that ranges through all parts of my life that are now completely different, right?

That lack of self awareness for some people where they're like it's fine, whatever. And we read it on Facebook all the time, angry people that are like, it's fine to be bald. If it's fine to be bald, you wouldn't be commenting

on this Facebook page.

Interesting, interesting. I mean, it is fine to be bald, but it's better not to be, surely. Yeah. Right? If you have the choice, if you have the means and the path to do something about it, then it's just a question of priority,

right?

It's, you know, do I upgrade my car or do I upgrade my hair? This sort of thing. Like it's a choice now. I think this is the other thing that I want to say is that my awareness of the effectiveness of a hair transplant or medication even as a doctor was very poor. I was aware of plugs or had the impression that they're going to implant horse hair into your head, you know, just some stupid... So you can answer this, right? What was the go with the old school plugs? I don't know! I don't know! But all I, you know, I had a...

You keep searching.
 
 Are Hair Transplants Hair Plugs?

Well I had a colleague, so a GP, that had plugs and they looked terrible. And the worst bit was he knew they were sh#t and so he didn't go and have a revision and so basically had a line of plugs and then basically bawled behind that. So it was really bad. Back to my point, I had poor understanding of what hair transplant was and how effective it could be. Well, go look through Gro Diaries if you want to know what it looks like. Look at any of your photos anyway, you won't see mine on the web.

We were talking about that because even now, a lot of people I speak to anyway, their perception of a hair transplant is it plugs. Even though it was 20, 30 years ago and you know technology's come a long way as you'll see with with Gro hair transplants now. That awareness of you know what actually takes place when

you're in a hair transplant and how, and we've discussed this before you

know how fascinated people are when you actually describe to them what happens. Yeah, that's overcoming the
 
 How Gro Hair Transplant Doctors Create Natural Looking Results

skepticism that's out there. Which is important. Right, because the skepticism is built up by companies like Ashley and Martin that don't want you to have a hair transplant. Yeah, exactly. So and you know what we just want, we just want people to know it's an option. We understand hair transplant is not for everyone. It's a choice but it is a real thing. The amount of hair we're implanting into an area can be up to 80% of the normal hair density. Depending on how many hairs are going in each graft, how good the donor is and so forth. So it is substantial, the amount of hair being put back, and it doesn't take that much hair to restore the appearance. You know, it is a case of good enough. It's not, okay, your hair is not exactly what it was, but boy oh boy, is it better than being bald. Yeah. Sort of thing. And that comes down, I'll talk about it a lot, hair transplant is an optical illusion. Right. It is. It's about creating something that looks like something but isn't the something that it's created to look like. Correct. And now all of our doctors, all of our hair transplant doctors are artists, okay, and they're trained to create that illusion, the hairline, the density that progressively reduces as you head to the back. It looks fantastic.

Yeah, and that's the biggest thing. When you look at hair transplants from around the world, you really see how good our doctors do it because of the way that it looks and it looks natural.

Exactly. And the technology, you know, Gro's invested a lot in training its people and the technology to make not just the result but the whole experience better. You know, everything from the way we take out the instruments and the method that we use to remove the hair, how we put them back in, it's all about results, efficiency, just a good experience.
 
 What is Over-Harvesting?

Could you just, earlier you mentioned that you'd be quite happily, you'd quite happily have your donor area over harvested. Even until about two years ago I didn't really understand what over harvesting was. Could you just explain a little bit more about what, how important the donor area is?

Yeah, sure. So the donor area is obviously the part of the scalp that we're taking hairs from, and those hairs, once they're removed, don't grow back, right? So there's nothing but a space there because you move that hair to somewhere else. So this is a question that we have to answer and explain to every client, is that once we take that hair from the back and put it at the front, it no longer grows at the back. So you've got a space. So you'll have less density at the back of the hair. But if most people grow their hair more than a buzz cut at the back, and the hair at the back of the scalp grows down, so it covers the gap under it that's been created by harvesting that graft. Over-harvesting is taking more than can be covered up by the surrounding hairs. So we aim when we're extracting not to take consecutive hairs, right, so it's take a hair, leave a hair, take a hair, leave a hair, take a hair, leave a hair, right? And that's what you do. But I'm saying if push came to shove with me, you can leave gaps at the back of my scalp and have it look like I've lost hair there and I'll take that hair on my crown. And with things developing like the tattoos, you could easily do both. You could have the hair on the top of your head or the crown, fill in density or even hairline and grow a look into this, providing this service in the near future as well. Because we are aiming obviously to be comprehensive and therefore not conflicted in any way about what the best solution for any given client is, whether it be a supplement, medication, transplant, tattoo, PRP or any new technology. That's what we want to do. We want to be the one stop.
 
 Hair Transplant Success Story

I had a client yesterday. He was a Norwood 7, so the worst end of the bald scale, but what he did have was a thick donor. So he had his hair transplant 12 months ago. You know it was a bit of a moment for me because I'm like looking at his before pictures before he came in and I'm thinking, would I have sold this guy? You know, is that the way I would have gone? He walked in with a perfect hairline. From the front he had the most incredible head of hair. all the way to the back. His crown was somewhat see-through. He was booked in to have SMP to dock in that crown. Just the result was incredible. And I think that there's not many clinics in the world that would be brave enough. Indeed. Because you just don't know what it's gonna look like. Exactly. One of the things that we love about Gro is that we do show journeys from sort of pre-procedure all the way through because of the way we do procedures and the people who are doing it. We believe
 
 Is Minoxidil as good as Finasteride?

in the outcome you know. It's wild. 100%. I think also just quickly to mention because I know we didn't necessarily talk about but the other class of drug that's effective is Minoxidil. So it's underrated and I underrated it personally and I underrated it mostly because I didn't take it properly. And this is having seen patients for three years for Gro's Prescription Hair Care Clinic, that is the majority experience is that, have you tried Minoxidil? Yeah, I gave it a try, it didn't work for me. Okay, and that was my situation and here's why. It takes about four to six months for Minoxidil to start working. Most guys run out of steam in about three months. Okay, so it just didn't work. I was putting this stuff in my hair, it was ruining my pillowcase, case, making my head itchy, so I stopped taking it. So four to six months to start working. Secondly, topical works but oral is better and the clinical studies have been published in the last couple of years show that what is still on the grand scale of things, a small dose of minoxidil, so two and a half milligrams or five milligrams per day, is as effective, if not more, than Finasteride. So combined with finasteride, it's very effective as a once a day capsule.

Yeah.
 
 Why Is It Important to Keep Taking Hair Loss Medication?

I always tell people not taking hair loss meds for a minimum of 14 months to see the effect is kind of like going to the gym for a week

and wondering why you don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Something like that, indeed.

Because of even hair cycles of rejuvenation of a follicle and you know after a hair transplant you're taking a strong hair, you're transplanting it, it's going to take really one cycle to

come back strong again.

Indeed.

But with weak damaged hair that cycle is not a one cycle wonder right?

No and it's you know the full hair cycle is up to years. So the first few phases are a few months and then years.

So for you, if someone doesn't take Finasteride or doesn't want to or has side effects, Minoxidil you believe in is as effective and that is a long term solution to the medicated side

of what they need to do.
 
 What does DHT do to hair follicles?

Indeed, because what the DHT is doing to the hair follicle effectively is switching off the signal to grow hair. That's what the DHT does and what Minoxidil does, there's lots of things that it does and commonly represented as increases blood flow, but its more important property is that it signals hair follicles to grow. It's not working the same way as Finasteride, but its end point is the same end point, which is telling the dermal papilla, which is at the base of the follicle, telling that part of the skin, grow a hair. That's what it does. So Minoxidil at the right dose is really effective and it what we see is particularly in our clients that are for hair transplant, it can just about revolutionise the donor area because it's telling all these donor hairs grow grow grow. And so then you've got this really robust follicle which is you know it's it's easier to see, it's easier to extract, it's easier to implant. Yeah, so that is worth thinking about too, is the role of Minoxidil pre and post-operatively. Is Minoxidil the ingredient in Regaine?

It is.

But it's just a very low dose.

So Regaine and most of those over-the-counter preparations are anywhere, I guess, between 2 and 5%. Some of the foams are like 4 percent. We do a topical that's 7.5 percent and that's quite effective. We can do it with Finasteride for those that don't want to take an oral preparation,
 
 Can I use Minoxidil to grow beard hair?

which is perfectly reasonable as a sort of a lower potency option. Yeah. There's a fair few of our listeners and people that come into our clinic that maybe don't have a hair loss on the top of their head but they want to you know grow a beard or they want to encourage hair to grow. Is

topical Minoxidil an option for beard hair? Hmm I think so, I think so but I I haven't read much about it. What I do know is that one of the objections that we, or one of the questions I guess we get about Minoxidil is, will I grow hair everywhere else in my body because I've already got back hair etc. The answer is possibly. Possibly. So about 10 or 15 percent of people taking Minoxidil will get hair growing more strongly elsewhere than without it, but the most common site is the sideburns. And in the clinical studies that have looked at hypertrichosis, zero percent stopped taking Minoxidil because of extra sideburns. So no one stops it. So the answer the question is, yeah maybe, but it won't be significant enough for you to worry about and that's the reality, that's certainly my experience. And that is the only side effect of Minoxidil? No, it's not. There are other side effects of Minoxidil which are which generally related to its effect on the cardiovascular system. It was developed as a treatment for stomach ulcers actually, found to then sort of worked on as a high blood pressure treatment. And then when the trials of the high blood pressure treatment were on,

all these guys were regrowing hair.

So we're on to something here. A very pleasant side effect. But the doses were whopping. For blood pressure control, doses like 40 to 100 milligrams a day and quite rarely used actually. As I said for hair loss treatments, like between 1 and 5 milligrams a day. So side effects can include low blood pressure. I've had a couple of patients that have had things like a run of palpitation, so they've felt an irregular heart rhythm. In those cases, I would lower it to the lowest dose, see if they still get the side effects, otherwise just cease the drug or go topical.

Yeah.
 
 How do I discuss side effects of medication with hair transplant doctor?

But very rare, like extremely rare.

And so for all listeners out there, if someone does jump onto a Gro combination pill or some Minoxidil or some Finasteride, what is the protocol if they do have some side effects or they wanna discuss changing their medication?

Yeah, it's very simple to contact our customer service and arrange an appointment to see one of the doctors. And the doctor will discuss the options for changing the regimen, whether it's
 
 Concluding Remarks

ceasing the particular ingredient or switching to a topical or lowering the dose, really depends on the nature of the side effects. Beautiful. And you touched on it earlier but there's you know you're now the COO of Gro but you've started doing the doctor appointments, so you've got to, you know, the whole journey from start to finish and Gro is doing a lot of work at the moment to improve the journey and the experience for the clients and that's only going to get better over the next,

you know, few months thanks to yourself. So I think, you know, what we want is keep an eye out for things cos the process and the

experience is going to get even better.

It really is. We've built a really good team at Gro, we've got some great people in the organisation and we're committed to improving the experience. what's good for the customer is good for us and we're committed to you

know that concept of you know world class, world-class high standards concierge type service this is what we're what we're all working towards. And it helps having people like yourself and and Mikko is the CEO and having that helping having that passion this is not just a job this is what we're passionate about helping people with hair loss. So yeah, no it's been good to have you on with us. I think we might have to do a part two at some point. Yeah, we could talk for hours with you Dr. Harry but we appreciate your time and we know it's valuable so we'll let you get on with your day. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, subscribe, have a listen to our other episodes and if you've got any questions just hit us up on the website or on Instagram or any of our socials. Yeah and just remember out there that any money that you do spend with Gro online will come off the cost of any

future hair transplant. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gro Diaries Podcast bourght to you by Gro Prescription 

Hair Care. If you would like any more information on hair loss or anything discussed in this podcast, If you would like any more information on hair loss or anything discussed in this podcast, please visit groclinics.com.au for all your hair regrowth needs.