What Is ADAM? (And Why a Digital Clinic Made Sense for a 23-Year-Old Losing His Hair)

Losing hair as a young 23-year-old Sri Lankan has its own unique journey. It starts by your buddies telling you, on one fine day, a phrase that comes out of nowhere when you least expect it — "adoh are you losing hair on your head." I was unaware of this fact till that moment. After which I started to live a second life, different from the one I was living. Because now this is the moment I started to know that something was up, that something was falling away.

Then starts the selfies — not of my face, but of the aerial drone shots from your front camera, checking your head every day. It gets to a point where your phone gallery begins to be a series of aerial headshots. At some point you realise you're basically running an unfunded, uncontrolled longitudinal study on your own scalp, one data point a day, sample size of one, no ethics committee, no grant.

There is a short phase of denial — I am only 23 — but the strands keep falling. You go on with life, but the problem stays in the back of your head, till one day you meet your parents and they say — "ahhh oyage thathege thatte oyatath enewa wage neh?"

Now you need to fix this. Thaththa got his thatte in his mid-30s. You are still a 23-year-old single dude. So, in normal Sri Lankan fashion, you ask your parents and grandma for advice (yea, a doctor asking a 70-year-old grandmother for medical advice, I see the irony) — to which she expertly prescribes an oily concoction of herbs and spices that smells like a heavily spiced dhal curry that smells like it contains more spice than dhal. Grandma, bless her, is running the same trial I was — n of one, no control group, tremendous confidence in the result anyway.

I applied this oily concoction for a few weeks, and it totally screwed up my scalp microbiome. I started getting heavy dandruff flakes and my shedding worsened. I knew about minoxidil even before this, but I was in denial. I wanted to go the natural route. Plus I was broke. I didn't have the bucks to spend Rs. 12,000 a month on imported Kirkland serums — and when you're 23, Rs. 12,000 doesn't convert into rupees in your head, it converts into the currency that actually matters: a month's worth of hoppers you are now not eating.

At this point in time, I was looking to start my own company. I realised I might not be the only bugger out there with a rapidly depleting bank of hair. So after a few months of finding suppliers and setting up operations, I launched ADAM.

So what is ADAM? ADAM is a digital clinic for men. We want to be the one-stop healthcare provider for underserved issues men face in Sri Lanka. We launched last September in hair care — because of my personal plight to make invisible the visible bald spot, and also because we saw a gap that could be filled.

Treating hair loss in Sri Lanka is a maze. A lot of misinformation, and most people are uninformed. Culturally, we default to Ayurvedic oils (I am not disregarding them — they have their place), but they do not have the evidence, and using them alone is a complete waste of money — and hair. Also, note to the reader, and this one's free: if something claims to have no side effects in medicine, know that there's usually no main effect to begin with either.

So yea, ADAM is run by myself and two doctors. We plan to expand to other health verticals and sports performance with time. And in this blog I'll help break down the actual science behind hair growth for us buggers in Sri Lanka. See you in the next one.

And on the "seeing a doctor over your phone feels a bit dodgy" front — you can retire that worry. Nobody misses the waiting room and the two-year-old copy of Hi!! magazine once they realise the diagnostic accuracy data on remote consults now stands up reasonably well against sitting in a chair in person. More on the exact numbers below.

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Scientific Citations

On teledermatology / remote consultation accuracy (relevant to the "digital clinic" model):

1. Diagnostic accuracy of teledermatology for skin diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Medicine (2026). Pooled 155 studies (30,412 records screened); found 76% diagnostic concordance across all skin conditions between teledermatology and in-person assessment. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12989395/
2. Shah VK, Jaklitsch E, Agarwal A, et al. Descriptive and Concordance Data for Asynchronous Teledermatology Consultations for Dermatitis: A Retrospective Study. Telemedicine and e-Health (2024). Found 78.3% diagnosis concordance and treatment modification in 97.6% of cases when compared to in-person follow-up. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/tmj.2023.0079
3. Effectiveness of Teledermatology on Clinical, Patient-Reported, and Operational Outcomes: A Systematic Review. (2024). Reports moderate-to-substantial diagnostic accuracy plus meaningful cost savings versus in-person care. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12952809/

On minoxidil and finasteride as evidence-backed treatments (referenced generally, expanded in later articles):

4. The effectiveness of treatments for androgenetic alopecia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (2017). Concludes minoxidil, finasteride, and low-level laser therapy are effective for AGA versus placebo, based on RCTs of good/fair quality. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190962217303067

On why "grandma's oil" alone is not a substitute for evidence-based treatment, and how it can worsen scalp conditions:

5. Pathophysiology, conventional treatments, and evidence-based herbal remedies of hair loss with a systematic review of controlled clinical trials. Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology (2025). Reviews the evidence base for herbal/traditional hair-loss remedies and notes that, while some show promise, robust controlled human trial data remains limited compared to minoxidil/finasteride. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00210-025-04286-6
6. A synergistic herbal formulation targeting Malassezia furfur and Staphylococcus epidermidis for effective dandruff management. (2025). Confirms dandruff is driven by microbial dysbiosis of the scalp — relevant to why an unregulated oil mixture can disrupt the scalp's microbial balance and worsen flaking/shedding. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12679390/
7. Longitudinal study of the scalp microbiome suggests coconut oil to enrich healthy scalp commensals. (2021). Demonstrates that topical oils measurably shift scalp microbial composition — the mechanism behind why the "wrong" oil mixture can tip a scalp toward dandruff. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8012655/

Note: citations 4–7 support the general claims made in this piece. Articles on finasteride, minoxidil, and combination therapy specifically will carry their own dedicated, more detailed citation sets.