Anti-propecia peddling: Jonathan J. Darrow -educated man horribly misinterprets graph

[californiaoceans911]

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billof...fda-approved-baldness-remedy-is-it-effective/



Paragraph 5 made me facepalm so hard that I almost gave myself a bloody nose. :doh:


The whole article is quite amusing for those that want a good laugh :uglylol:



From his website:
[h=2]About jdarrow[/h]Dr. Jonathan J. Darrow is a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and a post-doctoral fellow in the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. He holds a BS in biological sciences from Cornell, a JD from University, an MBA from Boston College, and an SJD (a dissertation-based doctorate and the law discipline’s highest degree) from Harvard, where he also completed the LLM program in 2009.


Wait was that Brigham & Women's Hospital you say? I smell PFS lol.

 

[Quantum Cat]

he's missing the point

Propecia is supposed to be a preventative, not a 'regrowth' med. I don't think even Merck claimed it would give siginificant regrowth

He holds a BS in biological sciences from Cornell

a degree in BS? that explains it then...

 

[californiaoceans911]

Yea I love how he compares the 50 hair regrowth to baseline rather than placebo. It's also cute that he says its a marginal benefit when looking at someone with 2200 hairs per square inch. If someone had that much hair per square inch I don't think they would be concerned with balding. lol

 

[xRedStaRx]

I skimmed quickly through the article.

Looks well thought out and cited.

 

[jacobi33]

The article seems ok to me, and I don't think he was intending it to be anti-propecia. Basically he sets up a straw man - the belief held by god-knows-who that propecia is a "cure" for baldness - and then sets it afire with the answer: Nope, it's not.

Which is well-known to us here, but maybe not to others (though the common sense of, "If we have a cure, why are there still so many bald guys?" would seem sufficient for firm skepticism on its own).

All he concludes is: propecia doesn't cure baldness; any regrowth will probably be very modest; the effects on the hairline are unknown. That was my understanding already. What propecia does pretty well is put the brakes on the balding process. I don't know how long that can last, but certainly longer than five years in most cases.

I want to add that having been on propecia for two weeks now, my scalp and hair feel and look better than they have in a decade. The frontal hair in the hairline area had got to the point where I couldn't get it to grow out and hang straight, like bangs - instead it would kind of curl up at the end, like a plant curling up and dying. But already it's as though the hair can breathe again, and it's started to hang down. It looks healthier and fuller (I'm also using Nizoral and Biotin, FWIW). My scalp has absolutely zero itch. Three weeks ago there was hair and "snow" falling everywhere - really insane.

This is an incredible benefit that often goes unmentioned. Perhaps my itch was unusually bad, but I doubt it. Regardless, nothing Darrow said contradicts any of this.

 

[anxious1]

i can assure you, that any changes in your hair you are noticing, is not due to the propecia you have been on for 2 weeks. since you have been on it, no more than the first millimeter of your hairs have been affected by it. probably not even that, given the space between the root and the skin.

I suppose its feasible its stopped some dandruff, but i doubt it. more than likely your experiencing the results of something you did months ago, or simply having good hair days, because of luck or something. After 4+ months you can say differences are the result of propecia.

 

[jacobi33]

i can assure you, that any changes in your hair you are noticing, is not due to the propecia you have been on for 2 weeks. since you have been on it, no more than the first millimeter of your hairs have been affected by it. probably not even that, given the space between the root and the skin.

I suppose its feasible its stopped some dandruff, but i doubt it. more than likely your experiencing the results of something you did months ago, or simply having good hair days, because of luck or something. After 4+ months you can say differences are the result of propecia.

Perhaps you're right, but I didn't do anything months ago, and I never have hair days like this.

And I'm not saying it's affected my hairs so much as my scalp, which in turn might have some effect on my hairs. All I can tell you is that right before I got on propecia my scalp was the worst it's ever been (it's one of the reasons I decided to finally take it). It is now the best it's been since I can remember. It started before I started nizoral, but maybe the effect is mostly due to the shampoo. Maybe the Biotin too.

If you say that propecia having anything to do with it is impossible, ok. Maybe it is. But I don't think it changes the fact that propecia does calm down the scalp, even if I chose to illustrate it with more of a stunning correlation of my own rather than an instance of actual causation. That was all I wanted to say, since the author didn't really mention that benefit in his article.

 

[californiaoceans911]

If the article seems well thought out and ok to people then there is a huge problem. He didn't seem to understand the concept of a control group.

 

[jacobi33]

If the article seems well thought out and ok to people then there is a huge problem. He didn't seem to understand the concept of a control group.

I'm not denying that, just to be clear. I'm just saying that article didn't seem to me to be anti-propecia. If I was still waffling on propecia or just discovering what it is and does, the article would not have deterred me from taking it or led me to take it. His claims were pretty modest, and I think his goal was to dispel the idea that finasteride "cures" baldness (which for the purposes of the article seems to be defined as regrowing a full head of hair).

I could be misreading him, but that's how I saw it.

 

[californiaoceans911]

I'm not denying that, just to be clear. I'm just saying that article didn't seem to me to be anti-propecia. If I was still waffling on propecia or just discovering what it is and does, the article would not have deterred me from taking it or led me to take it. His claims were pretty modest, and I think his goal was to dispel the idea that finasteride "cures" baldness (which for the purposes of the article seems to be defined as regrowing a full head of hair).

I could be misreading him, but that's how I saw it.

The article greatly underestimates the strength of propecia. He was basically saying that the people in the trials regrew a marginal amount of hair. Although this is technically true, it is not representative of the strength of propecia. That is why there is a control group. Had those people NOT been on propecia, they would have not only experienced zero regrowth, but they would have lost a large amount of hair.

You can't compare to baseline, you have to compare to the placebo group. Not only does he make this large mistake, but he also goes on to state that the average human head has 2200 hairs per square inch, stating that the regrowth was smaller than reported. The people in those trials did not have 2200 hairs per square inch, and trying to knock down the strength of propecia by comparing them to that value is just plain wrong. That's all.

 

[dreamermerlin]

2200 hairs per square inch? That is quite much, it would mean 155 grafts/square centimeter. or 341 hairs.
Who in the world has 341 hairs/square cm??

 

[californiaoceans911]

2200 hairs per square inch? That is quite much, it would mean 155 grafts/square centimeter. or 341 hairs.
Who in the world has 341 hairs/square cm??

People who aren't balding?