By John Goss, Founder of Adegen
I got an email last week that brought back every feeling I had when I was 19 years old and watching my hairline disappear in the mirror.
It was from a mom named April, and I want to share it with you because I think a lot of people can relate:
"Hi John, My name is April and I have been following you for some time now. I have an 18 year old son who is struggling with his hair thinning and has been for the last few years. We went to a dermatologist who did a ton of bloodwork thinking that maybe my son had a deficiency of some kind because he didn't believe it to be early or hereditary hair loss. Unfortunately, the bloodwork did not show a deficiency and he recommended my son use Propecia or Nutrafol for men. We went the route of Nutrafol because I did not like the possible side effects I read on Propecia. After 6 months or so, he did not see any results. We discontinued use and then tried Spartan shampoo. Also have not seen results after 6 months or so of using.
I have a big ask of you though... are you able to maybe have some sort of Zoom or video chat with him to encourage him to not give up just yet? I know it's a strange request maybe, but I'm desperate to help him get his hair back. This has truly affected him and his confidence. He seems down a lot over it and I'm really running out of ideas on how to help him. I've been stressed over this because I can't fix it."
Reading this, I felt like I was looking at a letter written about me fifteen years earlier.
April's son did everything right by conventional wisdom. He saw a doctor. He got bloodwork done. He tried the "safe" supplement route. He tried the specialty shampoo. And after a full year of hoping and waiting, he's worse off than when he started. Not just physically, but emotionally. Because now he believes nothing works.
That belief is the most damaging thing about this whole situation. The idea that you've tried everything and nothing is going to change. It is not his fault. It is the predictable result of a system that is deeply broken in ways most people never get to see.
I want to explain exactly how that system broke, and why the answer isn't that hair loss is hopeless. Because it isn't.
My Own Spiral Into "Natural" Solutions That Made Everything Worse
When I first started losing my hair, I did what most people do. I saw a doctor. I was put on finasteride and standard minoxidil. When those didn't deliver the results I expected, I concluded that the medical route had failed me.
So I did what a lot of people do next. I turned to supplements.
Saw palmetto. Biotin. Pumpkin seed oil. Herbal DHT blockers. I bought into the idea that maybe pharmaceutical approaches were wrong and "all-natural" was the answer.
What happened? My hair loss accelerated.
The supplements didn't just fail to help. They gave me a false sense of doing something while my follicles continued to miniaturize. I lost ground I could never get back, and I was left feeling completely hopeless.
My thinking became: "The medical route didn't work. The natural route didn't work. I guess there's just nothing you can do."
Does any of this sound familiar? Because I hear some version of it almost every day.
But here's the thing. That logic is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why your options appear so limited in the first place.
Why You've Only Heard of Two Hair Loss Treatments (And It's Not Because They're the Best)
Minoxidil (Rogaine) and finasteride (Propecia).
These have been the only FDA-approved treatments for hair loss for over 30 years. Minoxidil was approved in 1988. Finasteride in 1997.¹
Thirty. Years.
In a world where we've mapped the human genome, developed mRNA vaccines in under a year, and put AI in everyone's pocket, the official options for hair loss haven't changed.
Why?
It's not because nothing better has been discovered. There are ingredients with compelling clinical data, caffeine and tretinoin (retinoic acid) among them, shown to be as effective as or more effective than the two approved options, and meaningfully more effective when added to minoxidil.² But most people have never heard of them, and here's why.
In 1989, the FDA established that any product claiming to treat or prevent hair loss must go through full new drug approval. At the time, this made sense. The market was flooded with snake oil and the FDA was trying to protect consumers.
The problem is that FDA approval now costs somewhere between $985 million and $2.8 billion.³ ⁴ And to justify that investment, you need something you can patent, something competitors can't copy. But you can't patent caffeine or tretinoin. You can't patent most already available and proven ingredients, no matter how effective they are. So no company is going to spend a billion dollars proving that these ingredients work, even when the science supports it. The economics simply don't allow it.
This isn't the FDA being the bad guy. I genuinely believe they were trying to do the right thing. But the unintended consequence is a system where truly effective ingredients can never get approved, and consumers are left with the same options from 1997.
Enter the Supplement Loophole
So what happens when there's a billion-dollar market of desperate people and no new approved treatments?
Companies get creative.
Here's the loophole: you can sell a supplement for hair loss as long as you don't claim it treats hair loss. You just need some fine print at the bottom: "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."
Most people don't read that, and the people writing it are counting on that. What it means is: we're allowed to market this with hair-related imagery and testimonials, but we're not actually claiming it works, so we don't need to prove anything.
This is how you get supplement brands charging $80 to $100 a month for biotin, saw palmetto, and a handful of other ingredients with little to no clinical evidence for stopping pattern hair loss.
And I understand the business logic. It's the path of least resistance. You don't need a pharmacy license. You don't need state-by-state regulatory compliance. You don't need chemists formulating complex topical solutions. You just need good marketing and nice packaging.
But the result is that millions of people, mothers like April, sons like hers, and people of all ages and genders watching their confidence erode in real time, waste months or years on products that were never going to work in the first place. And they risk losing ground they can never fully recover.
What's Actually Going On Out There
I'm not going to name most of these companies. But I will call out Spartan directly, the shampoo brand April's son tried, because they took before-and-after images from our private Adegen Facebook group. Images where our customer explicitly thanked Adegen for his results. They used those images on their own website to sell their product.
Here is the original post from our Facebook group:
and here's that same image on Spartan's website:
And they're not the only ones. Here's another company called Peptonix using the exact same stolen images to sell their "Advanced Copper Peptide Solution":
Same customer. Same results. Three different companies claiming credit. Only one of which actually produced them.
This is what you're navigating when you try to find a real solution. And this is why the question isn't just "what works?"
The real question is: who can you trust?
It's not only supplement companies, either. There's been a massive shift toward "telehealth" hair loss brands over the last few years, and most people have no idea what's actually behind them.
The majority of these brands are marketing fronts. They don't have their own pharmacy. They don't formulate their own products. They contract with the same small handful of backend fulfillment pharmacies, reselling generic compounds under their own branding, and they frequently shop on price. That means pressure on the pharmacies to cut costs, which means lower quality and less effective formulations reaching patients.
Different logo. Same generic solutions from the same facility, marked up for the direct-to-consumer market.
Some have gone much further. You may have seen the recent story about Medvi, a telehealth startup that the New York Times profiled as a shining example of AI-powered efficiency. The company reportedly did $401 million in revenue in 2024 with just two employees.⁵
What the Times didn't mention: the company allegedly created over 800 fake doctor profiles on Facebook using AI-generated photos. They used AI to fabricate before-and-after images, images where you could literally see patients' fingers blending into their phones. They have since received an FDA warning letter, suffered a data breach exposing 1.6 million patient records, and are facing a class action lawsuit.⁶ ⁷
What I Did Instead (And Why It Took a Decade)
Now, I need to be honest with you. I am biased. I have a financial interest in you buying from Adegen. I self-funded this company entirely, and I want it to succeed.
So please take everything I say skeptically and do your own research.
But I'm very confident in my intention and here's why I started Adegen:
When I realized the supplement route was a dead end and the standard medical options weren't optimized, I didn't give up. I got obsessed. I started researching the actual science: why minoxidil fails for 40 to 50% of people (it's an enzyme conversion issue⁸), how tretinoin can address that bottleneck, how particle size affects absorption, how DHT does its damage through a pathway most products ignore entirely.
And I realized that to do this right, I couldn't just put a label on a generic formula.
I had to start a pharmacy. Get licensed in every state, which is an unbelievably complex process where some states require both the pharmacy and individual pharmacists to hold separate licenses. I had to hire chemists who actually understood how to build stable, soluble, effective formulations. Because it's not just about the ingredients. It's about the delivery vehicle, the emulsifiers, the precise chemistry that makes everything work together.
Think of it like baking a complex pie. You can have all the right ingredients, but if you don't understand the chemistry of how they interact, the sequence of steps, the temperatures and timing, you end up with ingredients that fail. Hair loss formulations work the same way.
The easier path would have been to make a supplement, build a nice website, and run some ads. But I'd already been on the receiving end of that approach and it didn't feel good to say the least.
So instead, I spent over a decade building something I actually use myself. Something I could stand behind. Something that addresses the actual biochemistry of why treatments fail.
That's the long game. And I believe (maybe naively) that the person who provides the most value and builds the best products eventually wins.
Here's the Truth
Not all supplement companies are bad. I take supplements myself, and there are legitimate uses for them in overall health.
But if you believe a supplement is going to stop hair loss, I'd ask you to think again.
The mechanisms behind pattern hair loss are well understood. DHT binds to receptors, triggers miniaturization pathways, and slowly strangles your follicles of blood supply. Biotin and saw palmetto don't address this. They can't. It's not that you're not getting enough nutrients even through a suboptimal diet, it's that those nutrients are not getting to where they need to go: the hair follicle. So unfortunately you can take supplements by the mouth full and it's not going to solve your problem.
What breaks my heart about April's email isn't just that her son wasted a year on products that were never going to work. It's that now he feels hopeless. He thinks nothing works. That learned helplessness is the most dangerous thing hair loss can do to a person, because it stops you from finding what actually can help.
Real solutions exist. They're just not easy to find in a market flooded with stolen before-and-afters, fake doctors, and billion-dollar marketing machines built on your desperation.
If you're in that place right now, where you've tried things that didn't work and you're starting to lose hope, please don't give up. The science of hair restoration has advanced enormously. The problem is that most of that science hasn't made it to consumers because the economics of FDA approval don't allow it.
That's the gap I've spent over a decade trying to close.
If you are ready to take the next step, the best place to start is with our 60-second HairIQ Assessment. Answer a few questions, and it will analyze your unique situation and build a complete protocol tailored specifically for you.
And finally, if you're like April and have been worried about side effects from finasteride or dutasteride, I highly recommend reading [I Was Terrified of Finasteride. Then I Read the Actual Studies] next. I used to worry about these medications too, until I actually looked at the data. The data might change how you think about this entirely.
References
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. NDA Approval History for Minoxidil (1988) and Finasteride (1997).
- Kwon OS, Pyo HK, Oh YJ, et al. Promotive effect of minoxidil combined with all-trans retinoic acid (tretinoin) on human hair growth in vitro. Journal of Korean Medical Science. 2007;22(2):283-289.
- Wouters OJ, McKee M, Luyten J. Estimated Research and Development Investment Needed to Bring a New Medicine to Market, 2009-2018. JAMA. 2020;323(9):844-853.
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Cost of Clinical Trials for New Drug FDA Approval Are Fraction of Total Tab. 2018.
- The New York Times. Profile of Medvi. March 2026.
- Futurism. AI-Powered Drug Marketer Medvi Responds After Allegations About Fake Doctors and Patients. April 2026.
- Aiia. 800 Fake Doctor Accounts, One FDA Warning Letter, and $401M in Revenue. April 2026.
- Goren A, Shapiro J, Roberts J, et al. Clinical utility and validity of minoxidil response testing in androgenetic alopecia. Dermatologic Therapy. 2015;28(1):13-16.
