This is OLD news guys.
Remember Waseda? He was preaching this stuff too. Amashisho and T-Flavanone were supposed to inhibit TGF-Beta topically.
Tons of people hopped on board and used all these herbs and topicals to block this pathway and that. Don't believe me? Go visit alt.baldspot and dig up some old posts on Zinc Oxide, Souhakuhi, Bayberry etc. etc.
The bottom line? Everyone went back to the big 3. It may not be great for everyone, but at the moment it's the best we have. Accept it.
This really should be repeated, and everyone going the natural route has to consider it long and hard -- what you are doing is not new -- it is the Waseda regimen, which has a considerable record in the archives of all the Internet hairloss forums. A record, I think it is safe to say, of failure.
Why of failure? One reason, I think, is the bioavailability problem -- all these herbs have all these wonderful properties in vitro, but get them into the body, and do any of them maintain these properties? Consider curcumin. According to studies cited here (
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/p ... index.html), detected serum concentrations of curcumin following doses of either 3.6g or 4g (depending on the study) was
zero. 3.6g is
ten of those capsules in supplement form. All of the phase 1 and 2 studies using curcumin that you can see in the above link use doses well beyond one or two capsules per day (except those for gastro-intestinal disease, in which case absorbtion into the bloodstream may be unnecessary for the supplement to have an effect). A similarly grim story goes for Resveratrol and lots of other promising herbs.
Now, you could go the ImmortalHair route and take insanely huge doses off all these herbs. Overwhelm bioavailability by brute force. Costs you $2000 per year to take his regimen. But at that point you have to ask yourself -- if I'm going natural because I don't trust finasteride, why should I trust taking a huge amount of substances that have never been tested together, are not even in isolation tested at the doses being advocated (or are in any sense indigenous to any human diet at those doses). Then there's the objection that Bryan rightfully raises from time to time -- if a natural ends up having similar effects to those of a drug -- the IH regimen has a lot of Beta-Sis, for example, and so has effects on hormones that are similar to those of some of the drugs considered for hair loss -- and if the side effects of the drug directly follow from the drug's function -- the sides of finasteride, for example, being what you would expect from the big drop in serum DHT -- then it is reasonable to assume that any natural with a mechanism of action similar to a drug will have the same sides as the drug.
I guess what I'm saying is -- perhaps someday, hair loss research will hit the point where treating the downstream effects of androgens will be more effective than tackling the androgens themselves. But we're not there yet, unless -- maybe, and this is a long shot maybe -- you're willing to mega dose supplements. In which case you are right back at square one when it comes to side effects and long term health.
(Now, it seems actually that the OP is not going wholly natural, in that he's considering drug containing topicals. In which case he has the option of Proxiphen or a poor man's Proxiphen of Rogaine/homemade spironolactone/Folligen or some such. And that might have a fighting chance of being as good as finasteride, without sides).
