I had lost a bit more then half an inch of hairline in classic MPB and I've 80% recovered it over two years.
Diet interventions beyond not under-eating were mostly irrelevant, as best I can tell. I was probably tending to under-eat for some years. Quantity of food (and stoking the furnace via exercise) dwarfs any neuroticism about PUFA and so-forth. I eat high quality Maine sardines all the time, for example. I am confident they make me feel better, PUFA and all.
The single most effective thing for general health and hair for me has been sunbathing. I think I have an especially high requirement for sun. I am of northern european extraction and live at ~39°N but still find I need as much midday sun as I can possibly get. If it's above 50F and a clear sunny day I will blow off a meeting to skip out to a park and take my shirt and shoes off and lay on a picnic table for 45m around noon. In summer if the sun is blasting on a Saturday or Sunday I will religiously spend the whole day outside walking, bicycling, sailing, drinking beer by a pool, whatever, wearing as little clothing as possible. Non-negotiable. Plans will be changed to take in sun. Even when visiting down around ~25°N I never wear sunscreen, walk around shirtless, never wear sunglasses.
Prioritizing physical fitness over other concerns. A lot of the takes on exercise in these parts are bollocks. The hormetic theory of exercise is correct. Power law training is correct: mostly go very easy, but very occasionally you need to force yourself to go very hard. With adequate recovery time, every now and then, it is very good to repeatedly sprint up a hill for half an hour until you puke, or force yourself to walk 20+ miles in a day even though everything hurts, or spend an hour doing as many pull-ups as you can possibly do. People telling you to avoid this sort of thing are wrong. In order to build health you need to force yourself to do physical activity you might not instinctively want to do, both daily easy stuff like walking and occasional puke sessions. I am very confident that people telling you to never force yourself to exercise unless you feel like it are wrong. Even a cancer patient needs to exercise.
Massage and derma-needling work to break up scar tissue. Derminator once a week is as effective as daily massage, in my opinion, and worth the investment. Neither are probably strictly necessary, but it certainly can accelerate things. Really big solid chunks of skin would flake off my scalp a couple days after needling while the tissue was remodeling.
Wholly agreed except the part about exercising till you puke. I think for many athletic people that’s a sort of wishful association with the teenage years where “going all out” would leave you feeling satisfied at a primal level. Going into adulthood most people “around these parts” are experiencing significant amount of stress and there are very tangible reasons to avoid intense exercise. A cancer patient absolutely should not be gearing up to do an iron man. Yes exercise is part of the recovery and building muscle helps shift the body into an anabolic state, but going to failure, despite the psychological boost it may provide for the really motivated people, is deleterious in every way, activating the entirety of the stress response, and sending shockwave throughout the body emanating from the injured tissues. Ultimately, if you enjoy the physical activity it’s gonna activate massively different physiological responses which can be super beneficial. Bouldering, walking on trails, playing tennis, exercising the power lifts or sprinting etc. are all going to be positive, in a low stress situation with a good metabolic rate. Flipping tires till you puke when your body temperature is 96.5 for the sake of an hormetic adaptation isn’t gonna end well.