Whitfield: enjoying the spoils of hair

Still in stealth mode as the intellectual property is in the process of being protected, Whitfield plans to have his “product and service” on the market within 12 months. His only guidance is that it is not based on “gene therapy” – an area being explored by several other British start-ups.

Telegraph suggests that Whitfield is The Real Deal because he’s already made a scrapbooking site:

To add to his credibility, he has already founded a successful internet venture called Miomi.com , which plots user-generated personal histories.

Sounds reasonable to us.

Another brassy hint-dropper was internet supplement hero Dr. Mercola on March of last year:

Mercola: the bald leading the blind

(On a side note, if you don’t have much hair, like me, then this is not a big deal. But I will start some investigational ADULT stem cell topical therapy soon, and there is a 90 percent chance I will have a full head of hair in one year — so at that time I’ll be paying more attention to my hair care. Dr. Phil starts it this week.)

and again a few months ago:

I am actually in the process of beta testing some topical stem cell factors that promises to provide me with a full head of original hair in the next three months. I am taking pictures daily so it will be fun to document the process.

Last we looked, Dr. Mercola and Dr. Phil’s heads still looked like undescended testicles, but there is still another month to go. Look, more cooks in the kitchen is a good thing in our case, but we could do without the perpetual overstatements that lend themselves to free hype-based marketing. There are many hopeful people that cling to these unrealistic promises.

Bonus: here’s a small video of Whitfield fishing for ideas at HealthCamp UK, in Nov, 2008: link

We had big expectations.

Our pre-millennial pipedreams were always clear; “The Year 2000″ was to be splashed above our lives like a marquee of technological miracles: jetpacks, robot maids, holograms, hoverboards, cure for cancer, cure for ugly, no more woes.

Cut to 2007 and the best we’ve got are iPods, vacuum robots that bump into furniture legs like retarded pets, cars that use a little less gasoline than your 1976 Monte Carlo, and every genetic defect we’ve always had. We’re still a bunch of disgruntled bald guys that can’t do a fucking thing about our shiny pates but ingest pharmaceutical poison and rub lotion on our scalps that smells like burnt condoms. But we can do it while listening to iPods!

I need hairloss with a slow hand

Not much has changed since 1997 when Propecia (Finasteride) forked from its prostate treatment roots (Proscar) to combat baldness. That marked the last FDA approved drug to treat hairloss, and is still only the second product to ever be cleared to this day. The first product, Rogaine (Minoxidil), was approved almost twenty years ago in 1988.

The vast majority of hairlosers attempting to self-medicate will typically stick with a combination of these two, complimented with similarly acting natural supplements and off-label uses of other drugs.

There’s a palpable sense of helplessness that comes with losing one’s hair; this is clear in the adolescent expectations that carry each new treatment forward, a reckless faith that however dubious the source, says this may finally be the thing to free you from your affliction and self-loathing. Every year becomes littered with the remnants of uncertainty, lost hope and disappointment.

Some things are always certain; enterprising cunt wafers entrepreneurs still continuously capitalize on men’s desperation and put out product after product of pseudoscience nonsense that read like the ads for x-ray goggles and hovercraft plans in the back of a boyscout magazine. Here’s a few recent favorites:

• Lasercomb: a device that shoots Deathstar lasers at your head while you brush hope into the space where your hair used to be.
• Toppik: a glitter kit for grown men containing baldspot glue and a salt-shaker filled with black spacedust. Just don’t go swimming. Or lay on pillowcases. Or people.
• Avacor, Folliguard: Why pay $15 for a jug of Minoxidil, the twenty year old drug, when you can pay $350 for what amounts to Minoxidil mixed with elephant toenails and strawberry jam? Nice try, fucking Harry Potter marketeers.

Some success can be found with current treatments. The recurring theme among almost all successful therapies is suppressing DHT, but this will always be a losing battle. Some men have regrowth, some don’t respond well, most just slow down the inevitable. Sprays, creams, pills, shampoo, concealers, hats, hairpieces– it gets to a point where the burden of maintenance and obsession outweighs the trauma of losing your hair in the first place.

On the off-label drug front, Nizoral (Ketoconazole), a drug normally used to treat dandruff in shampoo form, has been a popular additional treatment for hairloss in the last few years. Finasteride’s successor, Dutasteride, is being used for hairloss, but it isn’t the knockout champion as initially hoped. Topical Spironolactone is popular too, and also makes the rounds in the transsexual circuit as a chemical castrator. “I rub anti-man on my head”; quite the conversation starter.

Naturalists tend to concentrate on various antiinflammatories, Saw Palmetto being the main exception, used as a pussy natural alternative to Finasteride.

More extreme experimentalists will go for homemade concoctions and grey market drugs from other countries, like RU58841. A different mixture containing boric acid and requiring a lengthy stovetop preparation was popularized by a Japanese forum user named Waseda several years ago.

In the world of hair transplant surgery, limited donor hair will always be a problem. You’re basically taking evenly distributed hair from one area and putting it in another area, balding Peter to pay Paul. Some doctors have resorted to using extracted body hair, which is great news if you’re Robin William’s knuckles, but probably not so great otherwise.

Hair on the horizon

There’s a joke amongst hairlosers about every good treatment being perpetually 5 years away. For the first time in history, this may actually be an overestimation.

Several companies have been developing techniques to extract the loss-resistant follicles at the back of men’s heads, duplicate the cells, then inject them into the balding areas. This is commonly referred to as Hair Multiplication. True, it isn’t the ideal, which would be a vaccination against your own natural loss, but goddamn if this isn’t good enough. It’s expected to be cheaper than existing hair transplant technology, but there are still some unknowns about quality.

Leading the pack is Intercytex, a UK-based biotechnology company. They released the results of their phase II trial recently. Make no mistake about it; this is an exciting time. Not exciting in the sense of not looking like “that bald asshole” to the women across from you, but exciting in that we can see a finite amount of time left until that is obtainable.

Stay tuned!

The most shocking method being discussed by none other than Maria Siemionow and her team, is a full human scalp transplant. The first swing at this idea is not for the cosmetically challenged individuals that need a better head of hair to go with their new Ferrari, but a more practical use for people that have been badly burned or involved in some type of traumatic situation damaging their hair. Regardless of the current application of this hair raising innovation, this paves the way for rich or determined men to once again have a full head of natural hair.

How does one go from burn victims to men with money to burn? A procedure this severe would require anti-rejection medication, black market dealings, severe desperation and a Flashdance headband to cover your forehead circumcision ring. It’s a moot, overstated headline, what with so many technologies around the corner.

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