When we were young, our parents used to tell us vitamins would help us grow up strong and healthy. It's one of the rites of passage we all have to go through, learning how to appear to swallow pills while actually spitting them behind the couch. Yet, when we internet hounds are set loose on the www trail to information, there do seem to be small mountains of claims of health-giving properties for vitamins and a range of other natural products. So were our parents right? Should we finally move the couch away from the wall and see what treasures still remain behind?
We all know that Propecia has the FDA stamp of approval and none of the other natural products have been through formal clinical trials. It's one of the flaws in our current system of regulation that herbs and other chemicals with potential medicinal effects can be put on the market and advertised as effective without anyone checking to see whether they are effective, let alone safe. If any manufacturer wants to claim its product will cure a problem, it should have scientific evidence to support the claim and wait for the FDA to agree before being allowed to sell the product. As it is, manufacturers are experimenting on us without our informed consent. Yet we have all been taking vitamins for decades and, so far, no one has died of vitamin overdose. They seem safe even if the evidence of effectiveness is less clear.
When you get scientists into a room, there's some agreement that vitamin H, otherwise known as biotin, may be useful in strengthening nails and hair. Whether this is actually true, the vitamin regularly appears in hair products and cosmetics with a range of positive statements asserting it effective. This is good news whereas vitamin A in quantity actually encourages hair to fall out. So always check the label before consuming vitamins. This leaves us in the happy position of having nominal support from the scientific community for vitamin H for hair growth, and formal clinical trials in support of Propecia. In other words, it's not going to hurt you to add the right vitamin while taking the FDA-approved drug.