Laser therapy is one of the most exciting options to stimulate growth of new hair that was lost due to androgenetic alopecia or pattern baldness in both men and women.

If you are balding, you probably have heard of this therapy already. Laser hair restoration therapy is the application of an artificial light source through manipulation to serve several therapeutic purposes including hair regrowth. It is considered a complementary treatment as it doesn’t remove the cause of the condition but only address its effects. However, its importance in preventing the course of alopecia is similar to that of treatments that act directly on the cause — which is why it’s called complementary, to begin with.

The cause of androgenetic alopecia is believed to be the build-up of a potent derivative of the male hormone testosterone, dihydrotestosterone (DHT). With genetic disposition, certain hair follicles in the scalp become sensitive to DHT formation since the latter blocks the supply of nutrients to the former. In this manner, the follicles shrink to inutility. Hair loss, then, occurs.

Laser therapy is perhaps the best complementary treatment for androgenetic alopecia to DHT inhibitors, a group of treatments that, as the name suggests, either remove, prevent, or diminish the production of DHT or its formation in the follicles. Laser therapy is non-invasive, non-chemical, and definitely poses no side effects. In fact, the worse possible response you could get from this treatment is to get none at all.

It was in the early 20th century when real interests for phototherapy surfaced. The physician Niels Finsen won a Nobel Prize in 1903 for using it to treat lupus vulgaris. Since then, phototherapy became so many things for several medical issues such as tuberculosis and leg ulcers.

In the 1970s, phototherapy became a cosmetic jargon. At that time, light engineers, photophysicists, and dermatologists took serious attention in developing ultraviolet beam to be used as treatment.

There is no standard method of rendering this therapy, not even for other medical purposes. In laser hair restoration therapy, the phototherapy units, the types of wavelength, or the amount of exposed skin may vary significantly. However, the convenience of rendering it is what matters the most instead of the efficacy of the variables.

Low level lasers render photobiostimulation, a chemical process that converts light energy into chemical energy. This energy will be used to improve cellular metabolism as ATP production increases. As a result, the inactive follicles will be stimulated to produce hair again. LLLT is also believed to improve the blood flow to the follicles and thus, producing the same result.

Since LLLT was introduced in the medical and cosmetic fields, it has no documented side effects or adverse reactions with any medications or forms of treatments at that.