Blessed by the Potato

As you all know, I’m going prematurely bald. As many of you know, I’ve been taking rogaine (or store brand minoxidil) for about 2 years now to slow the loss. I haven’t regrown any hair, and in fact it hasn’t completely stopped my hairloss — just slowed it down.

Every time I’m due for a new bottle, I read the box it comes in (perhaps because I’ve got a touch of the OCD), and every time this figure completely stumps me:

“If your degree of hair loss is more than shown, this product may not work”

Yet there are three degrees of hair loss shown in the photos. It just confuses me all to hell. I think the image is trying to say that it will help with a greater degree of hair loss if the hair loss is further down towards the back of your head, but will only help hair loss further up if only a small amount is taking place… but I had to actually measure the distance those circles (squres here — they’re circles on the box, and to be fair, on the box they’re arranged vertically, so seeing the different levels of the boxes is even harder) were from the top of the guy’s head to see that there was a difference there. To my eye, it just looked like three different degrees of hair loss. I really think that figure needs to be redone… it also makes me wonder if I should stop using the stuff. I started out using it with loss somewhere around the middle figure (but possibly as bad as the 3rd), but I think my loss is even further up towards the front of my head than the first figure — and now I’m pretty sure I’m worse than all 3 (though my loss is more side-to-side than these sketches seem to be).

While I do believe it’s helped me not lose any more hair, I certainly haven’t grown any back. Complicating that fact, though, is that I’ve only been taking half the dose. This is something that I do almost all the time with medication: it usually affects me pretty strongly (and I did get enlarged hands and unexpected weight gain), so I’m the guy buying regular-strength versions of everything when everyone else is buying “extra strength value packs” and popping two just to be sure. Even when I had my kidney stone I was breaking my morphine in half. But… perhaps that doesn’t automatically apply to Rogaine. So, I’m going to give it 4 more months, and I’m going to use it at the full recommended strength. If there’s no regrowth then, it’ll be hello Lex Luthor look!

But if Rogaine asks, tell them I stopped using it because of that figure.