Who writes this, and what we are not

Shedding Phase is an independent publication about minoxidil. It is written by writers and researchers, not by doctors, and that is the first thing you should know about it.

There is no medical reviewer, and we will not pretend otherwise

No clinician has reviewed these pages. You will not find a reviewed-by-a-doctor badge on this site, you will not find a doctor's name or photograph, and you will not find a reviewer buried in the page's structured data where readers cannot see it but search engines can. Sites do all three, and it is one of the reasons health writing online is hard to trust.

What we do instead is show the working. Every fragile claim on this site traces back to a named, dated, linkable source — nearly always an approved United States drug label published on DailyMed, the National Library of Medicine's label archive. Where a label is quoted, it is quoted, not paraphrased, and the labeler and revision date go with it. Where nothing authoritative could be found, the page says so in the place you would have expected an answer.

What that rules out

Working this way rules out a lot of things a hair-loss site would normally do, and the exclusions are deliberate:

• No dosing. No milligrams, no strengths offered as recommendations, no frequencies, no volumes, no routines, and no quoting a carton's directions as though repeating them made them our advice.
• No before-and-after pictures, no "real results" galleries, no invented regrowth percentages, no timelines promised as outcomes.
• No reader testimonials or invented case studies. Nobody here has "tested" this drug on a reader's behalf.
• No clinic rankings and no named surgeons. That is a different business, with different incentives.
• No superlatives we cannot support. Nothing here is promised as certain, nothing is described as curing anything, and nothing is called clinically proven unless a named trial is being quoted.

What we cover, and what belongs elsewhere

This site covers minoxidil: what it is, what the approved labels claim, how the oral and topical forms differ, what the side-effect lists contain, and what happens when people start and stop. It does not cover hair transplants, it does not cover the hormonal hair-loss drugs in any depth, and it does not diagnose anything. Hair loss has many causes with real names — thyroid disease, iron deficiency, alopecia areata, scarring alopecias, shedding after illness or a medication change — and several of them need a doctor rather than a product. The over-the-counter carton itself says not to use it if your hair loss is sudden, patchy, or unexplained. We repeat that as often as it needs repeating.

Tell us when we are wrong

We would genuinely rather be corrected than be consistent. If a label has been revised, a quotation is out of context, or a figure has drifted from its source, send it to us with a link and we will fix the page and say what changed. Corrections are published on the page itself, not quietly rewritten out of existence.

How the site is funded

Two links on this site are marked partner links and may pay us. Nothing else does. The full arrangement, including what we refuse and why, is written out on the how this site is paid page.