I’m sure you’ve seen the ads: Grow Hair in 12 Weeks! Stop Hair Loss Today! Stop Baldness Without Costly Drugs, Chemicals, or Surgery! Turn Fallout into Grow-out with Only One Hour of Your Time a Week! Wouldn’t that be nice? Then all you’d have to do is send in your three easy payments of $29.95 and receive a combination of vitamins, a special shampoo or conditioner, several scalp masks, a battery-operated scalp massager, and who knows what else, and you, too, would look like the before-and-after pictures in the advertisements. Bald spot one day, waves of bushy hair a few weeks later. If any of this were possible, why would anyone be bald? There wouldn’t be a naked scalp in the house!
Some popular ingredients such as emu oil, zinc, superoxide dismutase, and green tea have some minor studies showing they have some ability to generate hair growth, but the research is not enough to warrant much attention. Nonetheless, these ingredients are promoted and glorified to the point of absurdity by companies selling products that contain them. The information enthusiastically states that there is abundant definitive research proving efficacy, when in reality the research is at best questionable, not done double-blind, and there are no additional, follow-up studies to verify the results of earlier studies. One study alone cannot by anyone’s definition generate conclusive evidence. That means the evidence is more like guessing than anything, and that’s something you shouldn’t bank on with your hair follicles.
Regrettably, almost all of the concoctions being sold for hair growth are nothing more than snake-oil treatments, here today and gone tomorrow. You would be better off throwing your money out the window; at least then you wouldn’t be funding the unscrupulous businesses that lure other hopeful but soon-to-be-deceived consumers into wasting their money.