Dr. Jeffrey GladdenFounder & CEO of Gladden Longevity

Why Popular Hair Treatments Often Fail You? 😱

11 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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1:05

In this brief monologue, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden evaluates two widely used hair‑loss treatments—minoxidil and finasteride—by citing quantitative findings from his literature review. He reports that minoxidil yields roughly an 8% increase in hair count, but its benefit is limited and accompanied by notable hair‑loss side effects. Finasteride, according to a synthesis of all published studies compiled in his book Grow Back, produces about a 12% increase in hair count, outperforming laser phototherapy. However, Dr. Gladden emphasizes that finasteride’s side‑effect profile—severe adverse events in men and teratogenic risk for women (including fetal harm from mere contact with the pill)—makes the modest gain questionable. The overall message is that both treatments offer limited efficacy while carrying significant safety concerns.

Chapters

Is that minoxidil comes in at about 8% hair count. So you can increase your hair count by about 8% using minoxidil. But it's really, it's really not very effective because there's a lot of hair loss to it with it. One inside. The second one you asked about is finasteride. If you study, if you take finasteride versus laser phototherapy, finasteride has about a 12% hair count. If you count all of the studies that have been made since that's what we did in my book. The book I wrote is called Grow Back. I went and, and studied. Sorry, I went and summarized every study by finasteride and it comes out to be about 12% increase in hair count. But the problem is, is that the side effects that are associated with finasteride, it's just not worth that 12% because for men, it does have pretty severe side effects. And for women, it's even worse. Even if you touch the pill and if you have, you know, childbearing, it will destroy any kind of type of the fetus. It's if a woman touches the pill. So it's very powerful.