Male Pattern Baldness unfortunately doesn’t give a damn about the stock market, your mortgage payment, your inability to obtain credit, or loss of your job. Its progression doesn’t mercifully halt when you have lost half of your retirement investments or are facing foreclosure.

As you know it can often be financially impractical to maintain a comprehensive mult-modal treatment to hair loss when you are standing in a long line hoping to get unemployment compensation. Are you doomed to lose your hair along with your house and job???

Not necessarily.

There are some hair loss prevention and regrowth interventions that cost next to nothing, that can be readily implemented, and will likely go a long way towards maintaining and regrowing your hair until you are in a position to implement more aggressive treatment measures.

Here they are in no particular order.

Oral Cayenne Pepper
Like Propecia, orally consumed Cayenne Pepper upregulates follicle IGF-1, and acts as a Substance P ( a neuropeptide that mediates systemic and local stress response), antagonist. Combined with Soy Isoflavones it grew hair in 88% of subjects with Androgenetic Alopecia, (Harada, et al). Cayenne Pepper (Ground Red Pepper), is available at any supermarket. The 5th Season brand from Walmart cost only 50 cents a bottle. The amounts of Capsaicin used in the Harada study amount to approximately one teaspoon of Cayenne Pepper a day.

Ground Flax Meal
Flax lignans function as enterolactone precursors, which downregulate both DHT and Androstenedione (via 5AR AND 17BHSD), both significant hormonal factors in pattern hair loss. One rather loosely controlled study showed a benefit of the oral consumption of a Flax lignan extract on pattern loss. 3 tablespoons a day of ground Flax meal will provide a rich source of enterolactone precursors, and benefit your health in myriad other ways. Flax seeds can be purchased in bulk from any large health food store, and be easily ground in any blender.

Coconut Oil
Coconut Oil consumed internally has a multitude of health benefits. For hair growth purposes its oral consumption has anti-androgenic properties, and was shown by itself to shrink prostates in rats when implemented into their diets. The human Coconut Oil consumption equivalent would be about two tablespoons a day for a 150lb person. Natural Coconut Oil can be purchased at Walmart, (Louana brand) for a fraction of what it costs in health food stores, 4 dollars and change for a 32oz container. Although it’s not organic or extra virgin, it likely has equivocal benefits.

Low Dose Proscar
Obtaining Proscar, which is 5mg finasteride (Propecia is 1 mg finasteride), or its generic, and sectioning it, using .5mg every other day, will get you more than a years supply of finasteride for the cost of one box of 30 tablets. Compare that to paying $70.00 or more a month for Propecia, not to mention the cost for followup visits to the doctor to keep your prescription indefinitely refilled. You can legally import up to 3 boxes of Proscar at a time without a doctor’s prescription, (it’s NOT a controlled substance). If you use finasteride (which I stopped in 2004), there is no reason you should be paying more than $5.00 a month.

2 % Nizoral Shampoo for a Co-Pay
2% Nizoral Shampoo is undoubtedly one of the best, and most underused frontline treatments for hair loss. Unfortunately, if you ask your Doctor for a prescription for 2% Nizoral Shampoo to treat hair loss, he is likely to look at you like you have 3 heads. Such is the general level of ignorance with the medical profession. Although Nizoral has been a mainstay in hair loss treatment circles for many years, most doctors (at least in the U.S.) only know of Rogaine and Propecia. There is a deft and rather obvious way around this. Simply tell him/her that you are using it to treat dandruff, for which it is FDA approved. There is an element of truth in that there are the same bacterial infiltrates treatable by Nizoral are found in dandruff and hair loss. Better yet you can phone in the request to his office, I’ve never known a doctor require anyone to physically show up to count the flakes. 2% Nizoral Shampoo is uniformly covered by insurance, and you can usually get it for a $5.00-$10.00 co-pay.

Emu Oil
Emu Oil is thick, absorbs readily, and disperses over wide area when only a few drops are topically applied. Anecdotal reports indicate Emu Oil, for some reason, is particularly effective at generating regrowth along the frontal hairline. One 2oz bottle typically last about 2 months at a usage rate of one application a day.