What would you risk to cure baldness?

Ben’s barber was the first person to notice he was losing his hair. After that it wasn’t long until everyone else noticed too. He was a postgraduate student in his 20s, tall and attractive in an equine way. But soon his receding hairline became an obsession. It was the last thing he thought about when he went to bed, and the first thing he thought about in the morning, when he would wake to find dark hairs scattered on his pillow. Like a growing number of American men, he decided to treat his hair loss. First, he tried minoxidil, an over-the-counter scalp treatment sometimes sold as Rogaine or Regaine. It didn’t work. He lost more hair and grew more obsessed. There was another treatment available: a drug called finasteride, which hair-loss specialists generally agree is the most effective treatment for male-pattern baldness. Merck, the pharmaceutical company that developed it, sells it under the brand name Propecia, but ever since its patent expired in 2013, countless generic treatments have become available. Finasteride works by blocking the production of the male sex hormone that causes hair follicle miniaturisation, the process that makes men go bald. Men’s health websites peddling finasteride claim that nine out of ten men who use it stop balding, while seven out of ten regrow some of their hair. But Ben was unwilling to try finasteride. He knew that this hormone-blocker came with a risk of depression and sexual side-effects: it could leave you unable to get erections and change the consistency of your semen. Some men believed these side-effects persisted after they stopped taking it. They referred to this as post-finasteride syndrome (PFS). (Font The Economist)