what's up everyone we're back I'm Dr Shaw Dr Maxfield and welcome back to our Channel Dr we talk about all things skincare and dermatology and within Dermatology that also includes hair growth so in this video we're going to be talking about our top hacks for using minoxidil and just hair growth in general so monoxil is the gold standard for treating hair loss at home and we're going to show you how to use this to get the best results so all things minoxidil and hair loss here we go now before we get into this video there's somebody at home watching and they're thinking to themselves these guys don't have great hair how dare they be talking about hair loss and it is a very important topic to both of us we both care about our hair quite a bit but the truth is our hair would be much worse if we did nothing about it so so it is working I promise you that it is working now let's get into it here we go here we go so a brief history of minoxidil minoxidil started as a blood pressure medication so initially it was meant to treat hyper attention people would take it by mouth and then a bunch of people in the study started growing hair everywhere and they were like whoa why is everyone growing hair maybe this is a side effect of the medication and then what ended up happening was a company called Rogan or a brand called Rogan started marketing the topical version oral minoxidil as a treatment for hair loss and even to this day it is the only over-the-counter approved treatment for androgenetic hair loss in both men and women right and so what you'll see at the store are different versions of this and the first hack regards which one you should be purchasing so you'll see 5% you'll see 2% and the first hack is that everyone should be using 5% minoxidil and preferably the foam one 5% because it's been shown in studies to be more effective than 2% regardless of gender so 5% regardless of gender but also because the foam has less irritating or allergenic ingredients than the liquid which has Perle and glycol which a lot of people do not react well too so in my preference if you like the format I like foam over the liquid yeah if you can survive the format that is the one you should be using okay so now we know minoxidil is kind of your goto it is something that you do have to use over a long period of time so it's not going to work right away even with any hair loss treatment you have to give it at least 6 months to see results maybe you'll start to see some little nubbins of hair come out at the 3mon and a lot of people will say well do you have to use it forever yeah I mean if you don't water a plant forever would die it's not like you're going to lose more hair than you would have already lost with normal aging so don't worry too much about that the next two tips are going to have to do with how to make minox actually more effective at home for you so first up micr needling plus minoxidil right so one of the barriers to entry is your barrier to entry and that is your skin so one of the things that works best is to take these sterile needles ideally and create these channels in your skin to help the minoxidil will absorb more deeply make it more effective because if you look under the microscope at the scalp this is some pretty thick skin it's actually pretty thick subcutaneous fat underneath the skin and that's where the hair lives and that's where the ingredient Needs to Go 100% And so if you look at any study on any topical pharmaceutical agent what they find is that the stratum corneum which is that very very top thin layer of the skin is the greatest barrier to product penetration into the skin so first you have to break that stratum Corum second to get deep into the skin where those hair follicles are to stimulate them it needs to get even deeper into the skin so when we look at the studies of minoxidil alone versus minoxidil plus Micron needling minoxidil plus Micron needling has been more effective than minoxidil alone in every single study now the depth of the needle or the length of the needle in all the studies have been 1.5 millim now there's one study on mice that shows that 0.25 mm and .5 mm are quite effective because it's able to break that stratum corne layer now this has not been proven out in humans regardless 1.5 or even a lower smaller needle could be quite effective for you so in general we advise against using bigger needles on the skin at home in the office obviously that's controlled setting professional setting very good results at home generally will'll stick to smaller needles and so theorizing because the Strat of corium is the biggest hurdle even a smaller needle will probably be beneficial when combining it with Minoxidil now if you are going to be doing this at home you want to make sure that you're cleaning clean the skin before but also that you're cleaning the needles after every use or you're using a new needle or a new dermar roller before every use because the biggest risk would be that you introduce in infection into the skin which would make your hair loss much worse so just make sure that you're cleaning those needles and finally this should be not used on the same night that you're using minoxidil so the studies that this was done in now do I think it's risky if you do it on the same night I mean who knows but ultimately in all the studies that they did Micron needling plus minoxidil they let's say they Micron needled on Sunday on Monday through Saturday they used minoxidil and then again on Sunday they would Micron needle so they didn't Micron Needle on the same night that they used minoxidil so just be careful it's only once a week Micron needling and then the other six nights of the week you're using the topical minoxidil next we will incorporate one of our favorite ingredients to elevate monoxil and this is tro and it's also something I'm extremely passionate about as you can tell by like my facial expression kind of pissed about this was like the most misunderstood hack of 2024 people everywhere Tran grows hair tranan grows hair it really does not the studies almost exclusively show that tranon plus minox will grow hair and there are two major reasons why one of them is that it can actually increase the penetration of the medication and so like we said penetration is always an inhibitor for something being effective when it's applied topically and troan has been used in many cases to increase the penetration of other medications so theoretically troan can increase the penetration of your topical minoxidil but there's also a more thoughtful mechanism of why it actually enhan es the aacy of monoxido so you have a fancy little enzyme in your hair follicles called sulfotransferase now the more active this enzyme the better response you get from minoxidil and troan activates this enzyme so it has been shown to show to turn and convert minoxidil non-responders into responders so that combination is very very important and interestingly too just saying aspirin turns that enzyme down so as much as tranon helps aspirin May inhibit it um just throwing a little tidbit of information out there because that ALS just does not exist and you probably need to hear it however if you need Aspirin because you are trying to prevent a stroke or a heart attack continue using your aspirin you got to prioritize your hair versus your heart or your brain so definitely focus on your internal organs first now that being said retinoids plus minoxidil can increase their efficacy I'd start off with just using your minoxidil alone until your scalp gets used to it but if you want to enhance the penetration or you're not responding to it as well then you can add in your retinoid next hack oral minoxidil versus topical minoxidil almost every study that's ever been done on this shows that lowd dose oral minoxidil in both men and women is more effective than even 5% topical minoxidil so if you can tolerate it oral minoxidil is actually the preferred route and I will go one step further because the question is what about both could you use both and I would propose yeah probably I think you do find that this is prescribed in combination it is a bit redundant but sometimes we will duplicate effects in even like acne regimens to get an added benefit so if you had to pick one oral is more effective if you want error on safety topical is probably a little safer if you want to just get like the best results possible then you might consider doing both and you do have to get oral minoxidil prescribed so that's a conversation you'll have with your respective dermatologist right and oral monoxil is technically not FDA approved for hair loss and so again this is going to be a discussion with your dermatologist to make sure that this is the right choice for you but and it also has other side effects like swelling in the legs you know puffiness around the eyes it can cause orthostatic hypotension where when you stand up you could start to feel faint and so of course this is a discussion with your dermatologist but it is more effective and then we're going to go into some bonus hacks some bonus hacks here is that even though we love minoxidil combination therapy with Minoxidil plus other things is going to amplify the effects of minox in general especially if you have that androgenetic or hormon driven type of alope in the scalp so when you use finasteride plus minoxidil that's going to be more effective dutasteride plus minoxidil that could be more effective if you use low-level light therapy plus minoxidil that could be more effective so using these together if you look at it I always say that growing hair is like a garden you don't just do water you do fertilizer you do sunlight these are all very important so when treating hair loss using minoxidil plus other things is going to amplify its benefit right and if you think about why that would work it's because the masculine hormones it work on the hair follicle that eventually cause it to miniaturize shorten the antigen or growth phase and eventually disappear so monoxil works on the growth phase the hormonal part actually works Upstream on the hormones you get this like complimentary synergistic benefits that treats a more comprehensive picture than just one ingredient alone absolutely so in a lot of my patients specifically for men I'll do oral or topical minoxidil plus finasteride as a starting treatment and then for women if it's appropriate for them I'll do a topical or oral minoxidil plus an oral spirolactone and that way you're going to get combination treatment for this androgenetic Alp the next hack that I think is one of the most social facing forward ones is ketoconazol what is this magical little ingredient that lives in your over-the-counter dander shampoo and why might this help your hair loss well uh it works in two ways the first way I'll take is actually the more indirect way and that is it helps with inflammation there's some thought that the yeast that causes dandruff can cause enough inflammation that it can damage the hair now is it directly causing damage or is it like a subtle byproduct we're not really sure but just the anti-inflammatory component of the ketoconazol and the killing of the yeast might help alleviate some of that hair loss absolutely so there are a lot of expensive shampoos out there for hair loss but truthfully none of them has showed consistent results and independent studies the way that topical ketoconazol shampoos have and so if there was one shampoo I was going to buy for hair loss that I would be pretty confident would work would be a KET conazol shampoo now there's another way that this works is that it also is an androgen inhibitor and so because androgenetic alopecia is caused by androgens acting on the hair follicle which miniaturizes them by blocking these androgens it can be quite effective at stopping hair loss right so there's your shampoo hack for your hair now for these types of shampoos you want to leave them on the scalp for 2 to 3 minutes make sure that that medication really sets in that's going to make it more effective for dandruff you also want to massage it in with a little bit of a scalp scrubber leave it in there allow the medication to work and then wash it out and the final bonus tip for hair loss is that time is hair now this is a term that we apply in cardiology where when someone has a heart attack we say that time is heart or time is brain and stroke right so basically the faster you intervene when someone's having a stroke or a heart attack the more likely you are to get reuion the more likely are this person is to survive and it's the same thing with hair loss time is hair the quicker you intervene with treatments like minoxidil the more likely that they are going to be effective and the more likely you're going to actually get your hair back without a transplant and so the sooner you act when you start noticing hair loss the more likely you are to see results so act quickly don't delay your hair loss treatment especially if your hair is important to you like it is to us yeah exactly it is interesting kind of trying to push this into the same category though it's like time is brain time is heart time is hair but it is still true study show over and over again the sooner you start the better your results will be and the longer you will be able to keep your hair and it may not be infinitely like the odds are this is not infinite and let me address this concern right here I see you keyboard Warriors out there you're typing away do you have to use Minoxidil forever the answer is yes because this is the same across the board for any age related change our are programmed to age that's the trajectory we are all on and anything that mitigates the effects of time is a permanent thing so yes it won't regress you won't like to lose all your hair as soon as you stop it but you'll go back to the same trajectory that you were headed on if you do stop it absolutely so the best way this is explained to me is that your hair loss Lifeline is like a treadmill it kind of keeps turning over now if you start minoxidil kind of sits you backwards on your timeline or pauses that timeline but if you stop the minoxidil you're going to start losing hair at the same rate that you were going to lose hair anyway so again it's something to nurture your hair in the process to keep it so it is something of a long-term commitment now if you stop it you're just going to go back to where you were you're not going to lose more hair than if when you started it so don't be too concerned about that and it does take a long time to work but it is the most effective treatment that we have available over the counter so it's still something that your dermatologist will often recommend despite there's a lot of other people that will try to sell your hair loss treatments this is really still the one that I would recommend first for most people yeah it's the first it's the cord it's the staple you build on it from there and that is it so if this is an ingredient for you if this is what you need for your hair then I would go check it out and we will have more hair hacks coming all right we're back do we look different maybe we look different we've been doing this more often than usual and sometimes we just feel like a video is not complete we needed to drop two more hacks that felt tantamount to this video and we could not release it unless these two hacks were completed so first would be using minoxidil for beard growth right now there's a very interesting relationship between the hair on your head and the hair on your face they are at odds and no one talks about this because how would this come up in small talk and conversation throughout the day but ingredients that may help grow hair here might stop growth here or ingredients that grow hair here may stop growth here why is that it's because the hormones that help grow hair here are the same hormones that might decrease hair here so one ingredient that can help in both areas is Rogan or minoxidil right so Rogan or oxidil is hormone independent it makes you grow hair everywhere and this is why if you take oral minoxidil you can grow hair everywhere this is why if your minoxidil drips onto your face you can grow hair on your forehead all of these things are relevant because there's a study that shows that topical lotion 3% minoxidil can promote beard growth my opinion is that any form of minoxidil is going to promote beard growth so you can just rub it into your beard and it will promote that beard growth now I believe the script is working on something in this category so I don't know if it'll be out by now I don't know if it'll ever be out but I received a sample of this like 6 months ago so stay tuned for that potentially let's talk about the last hack the last hack so basically this has become a game of where do you have hair where do you want it to grow the last hack here we'll go with ey brows so do you want a bushier brow well if so because again this hair growth is independent of hormone influence again minoxidil will be a hero ingredient here for eyebrow growth absolutely just like we said it will grow hair anywhere so you can of course use it on the eyebrows I have a little bit of anecdotal experience here because my wife did a lot of tweezing a lot of threading a lot of waxing when she was younger I did as well I'm not going to lie and for some reason she suffered more from like attration alope pich on her eyebrows where her eyebrows didn't really grow back in fully from that she started to use Minoxidil on her eyebrows and it's actually helped a ton to make her eyebrows a lot thicker so I have anecdotal experience that it works really well my main concern with Minoxidil around the eyes is that for me specifically it causes a lot of puffiness due to the water retention when using minoxidil and you definitely don't want this to get in the eyes it's definitely being used off label so you have to be very delicate with how you apply this now she's using one of those little spoolies where she dips it into the minoxidil and spoolies it into her eyebrows and basically Combs it into there this is actually a really good way to get it into those areas that you don't want it dripping too much it's a really good way to get it into your beard as well so using a spoolie is kind of like half a hack essentially to add to our list and they just quickly Google a spoolie oh yeah yeah yeah I've seen these things it's the mascara thing so yes using a spoolie to get this into your eyes again not into your using a spoolie to get to the base of the hair towards the follicle right you don't want to brush this into the hair you want to get this at the base of your hair follicle is another great great great way to use this ingredient yeah so that pretty much wraps it up we felt that that was important please like comment and subscribe and let us know what you want us to talk about next y thank you all so much for being a part of this and let us know what hacks you want us to do next time this has become kind of a fun series for us even though we do have to consistently add in hacks at a later date but we're enjoying it so let us know what you want us to talk about we'll see you in the next one see you next time