Full Audio Transcript:

I posted a photo of hair stem and I had a gentleman ask, what are you doing with this? I decided, well, I’m gonna do a podcast on this to explain a little bit more in detail the evolution of my thinking of how we developed this process and what we’re achieving with it. So, essentially, I haven’t been as excited with PRP or Platelet Rich Plasma, which basically, for those that don’t know what it is, you draw blood out of the body, spin it down, ultra refine it, and then inject it back into the scalp.

Now, I do use PRP with every single hair transplant procedure. I find that that has worked really well in terms of helping ensure graft survival and improving more consistency in graft survival. So to me, that’s a no-brainer with surgery, I’ve been doing it since 2010 or 2011, so 11 or 12 years now, at the time of this podcast. However, with PRP, I’ve tried it with A cell, which is a poor sign, acellular dermis that I have gotten sometimes good results, sometimes not good results, and I’m not getting as consistent an outcome as I would like. So, I was looking the last couple years for something that could be a replacement and so we developed this process, which I wanted to overcome some of the limitations of PRP.

So what are the limitations? First and foremost is pain, people hate the pain of having blood draws, having an anesthetic block placed across the scalp, and then injected in there and then there’s a recovery involved with that. Especially if they do that repeatedly. With women, it’s even worse because with women, with their fine hairs there, sometimes they actually undergo a shock loss with PRP, which is also not good.

There are a lot of issues with PRP injections into the scalp, in my opinion. The one I just mentioned before is variable results. So you get variable results, painful outcomes, risk of shedding and you said, well, why do you get variable results? Because the number of active growth factors in your blood is inconsistent. You don’t necessarily have a high concentration of it, even if you concentrate native blood, and I can’t take someone else’s blood. What you look at is right now, if you think about what sort of postmenopausal women are going through is that they get something called biomemetic or bioidentical hormones, you’ve probably heard about that. They’re plant-based hormones or plant-based growth factors. In this case, what this is, it is a concentration of plant-based growth factors in a very concentrated format that are placed at a very high level and concentrated and then infused through the scalp through a special device that I use after exfoliation that allows the growth factors penetration.

The nice thing with that in about 90 minutes, it takes about 90 minutes to do the session. There is no pain, there’s no recovery, and there’s very little risk of shedding, although there’s always a risk of shedding anytime you get near that area. It just makes the scalp healthier and look better, as well as the hair but it actually stimulates hair growth pretty quickly. I’ve seen it sometimes even after one or two sessions.

So the way that I do it is I do it once a month for three months and then maintain it every six months. Now, if you’ve got, if you’re younger and you have more aggressive hair loss, I may do it every four months for a while before I go to six months. In general, you can usually maintain it every six months. Now, the key with this, just like PRP, it’s not necessarily a substitute for Finasteride Minoxidil particularly for men.

I think men in general need to be on a regimen. First of all, I would encourage you to listen to my Hair Genome podcast to understand sort of how I integrate my philosophy with the chemical side of things for men. But for men, I think that their hormones are just too strong. I just don’t think that as a standalone this therapy would be ethical or rational. Now, with some exceptions, you know, if a man has already been stable on medical therapy, fantastic. Or, I mean, as a bonus, as the one that I show with the before and after, or if someone is, let’s say older, they don’t really want Finasteride Minoxidil, they’ve got a pretty slow hair loss. They want something to maintain it, it’s a great reasonable option.

To be honest with you, for women, it’s oftentimes a first line for me because women don’t necessarily need Finasteride Minoxidil. I go with them using a combination of this hair stem therapy and my follifll spray, which unfortunately right now is sold out on Amazon so I’m trying to get my supplier to re-up on this. So, as of right now, there’s, you can’t even get my product. I’ve sold out all thousand units in the last, like less than a year or so, it’s been insane. The demand on this product, which has been great. It’s all natural spray that helps with the regeneration. But anyways, I can do another podcast on that. I think I’ve done one on this, but that is, that is my go-to for women oftentimes as a first line. Now, do I always do it as a first line? No, some women have what we call Ludwig threes that are really advanced and they need something biochemical in addition to a full workup. I’m gonna do a podcast specifically catered to women to give more of a detailed current philosophy of how I approach women. But anyways, this is a general understanding of how I approach patients that would benefit from this hair stem therapy.