Peanut Buttering

Try ketoconazole shampoo if you have dandruff

I don't know who needs to hear this, but: see title.

There's all sorts of dandruff shampoos available for purchase, from tea tree oil, to Selsun blue, to fifteen different varieties of Head & Shoulders, and surely many others. All claim to help with dandruff, and if they work for you, great!

Then there is one tiny nondescript bottle hidden amid the rest of them called Nizoral, whose active ingredient is 1% ketoconazole. Compared to all the others, this one looks like it doesn't even want you to buy it. It's small, expensive, and usually on the bottom shelf. Because of this, you probably haven't tried it, but it might help you if nothing else has worked.

But the really good stuff is 2% ketoconazole, which requires a prescription. You can probably get this easily from a doctor, or I recently discovered that Amazon has a product called Amazon Pharmacy where you can pay ~$25 to fill out a form saying "I have [symptom]" and a doctor will just prescribe you various medicines. You can get 2% ketoconazole either as a shampoo or as a leave-in foam, and both seem to work equally well.

I tried just about everything else with mixed results, but 2% ketoconazole seems to completely eliminate dandruff for me. Also, supposedly ketoconazole can reduce hair loss? So there's an extra bonus reason to use it. All of this applies specifically to topically applied ketoconazole -- apparently there's also oral ketoconazole but it's a whole different thing which I am not recommending.

It worked for me! Maybe try it?