Television ads are always on the edge of the truth. Those that write the copy have to strike a balance. Their clients want a high sales trend following the ad campaign. "Tell ’em whatever you need to get them to buy", is the usual instruction. But there are these inconvenient Truth-in-Advertising Laws aimed at protecting those poor innocent consumers who might be taken in by all those lies. The idea is a simple one. Advertisers should not claim anything that cannot be substantiated. And in the background, the FTC is lurking, ready to pounce if the ads are considered deceptive. There can be expensive law suits and, worse, penalties if the ads are "unfair".

So can hair loss drugs beat heredity? As always, the answer needs a little explanation. It starts easily enough. No drug on the market can prevent you from losing hair. Your body is designed to shed hairs everyday. Under normal circumstances, they grow back. Worse, as we age, more hair will drop out. That’s also unstoppable. So it does not look good for the drugs. Unlike heart disease where there are drugs to prevent the first symptoms from developing into the disease, nothing beats your body clock’s determination to shed hairs every day as you age.

What’s the genetic reality? As you probably know, men are XY and women are XX. When babies are made, each parent contributes half the genetic make-up of the child. Mothers can only give one of their X chromosomes so it’s the man who decides on the sex of the baby by either contributing an X or Y chromosome. Because of the work to analyze genes, we now know the genes controlling hair loss come in the X chromosome. That means whether you get to lose your hair early is decided by your mother’s family line. If there’s a bald maternal grandfather hiding just out of focus in old photographs, that’s probably going to be you.

How is this helping? Well, if you have the wrong genes, your hair follicles are going to react to the arrival of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by slowing down the growth of hair. What does grow will emerge thinner and more likely to fall out of the roots. That’s why you start going bald. Hair that drops early tends not to regrow. DHT is produced in the adrenal gland and this is what keeps men male, i.e. it reinforces the usual male "characteristics". With the wrong genes, this triggers hair loss on the scalp — not the rest of the body. This is where Propecia comes in. It prevents your adrenal gland from manufacturing DHT out of "ordinary" testosterone. Without there being the same level of DHT in your bloodstream, your hair keeps on growing. So Propecia does not beat heredity. Rather it carefully gets round it and lets you keep your hair. This makes the advertising so clever. It’s not unfair to claim a drug like Propecia can beat heredity. You beat someone or something by going around it. Winning is not always a battle to the death where one side batters the other into submission. Winning can be sneaky. That does not make the ads deceptive either. They are just elegantly playing with words to make you want to buy. Better still, the drug works so, if you buy, you are a winner!