Old Wives Tales of Hair Loss

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This podcast is talking about old wives tales. When it comes to hair loss, I’m going to talk about two of them. So the first one is if your maternal grandfather that is your grandfather and your mother’s side is bald, you must be bald. This is what you’ve heard many times. The answer to that is absolutely false. I am 51 years of age and I have no really balding. I’m a Norwood two pattern. And my maternal grandfather was completely Norwood six, seven bald. By the time he was around my age, if not before then. So clearly that is false. The district, the inheritance pattern of male pattern baldness or female pattern baldness is what is known as Polly genic. That means it comes from multiple gene sites. In fact, there’s variable expression. So it’s not just genetic. There’s also, in my opinion, an epigenetic component. I’ve had a couple of podcasts where I talked about this movie called three identical strangers.

And in that movie, the three identical twins who met each other later in life grew up in different environments, actually had completely different hair loss patterns based on their smoking habit based on environment, based on other things that were factors in their life. Even some psychologist psychiatric issues, one of them, committed suicide. So there is a lot large part of our environment that can cause hair loss. I do a lot of cupping which may sound weird to people out there, but I think we have, our body has a lot of toxins in it, and this is one way to help minimize hair loss. In my opinion, this is one of the many things that can contribute to hair loss. So the old wives tale, which is your maternal grandfather, is a reason why you’re you should be bald is not accurate.

In fact, you know, what’s interesting is I don’t even take a family history. I don’t even ask you how many brothers and sisters or fathers or mothers or grandfathers or uncles or aunts or cousins have hair loss because honestly it doesn’t matter. I can have a two identical twins and look different as I said. And so what I care about is how are you losing hair? What is the speed of your hair loss? How much time? Because if you’re losing hair rapidly in your mid-twenties and you tell me every one of your family is not lost hair, what does that mean? To me? It means absolutely nothing. I look at you and I got the answer on the flip side. If you’re not losing any hair and you’ve got a lot of people losing hair in your family, well, maybe that bodes well for you.

But honestly, I look at you if you’re 42 years old with no hair loss and you’ve got everyone in your family, I know what six, seven, which is very advanced baldness. It doesn’t matter very much. The second, old wives’ tale is wearing a hat will cause hair loss. This is also false. Now, I guess, theoretically, if you’re wearing a hat that’s so tight that you have no blood supply up there that’s possible, but I don’t think anyone would do that. Cause you probably will have your forehead fall off. So wearing hats should not cause baldness. So those are a couple old wives tales out there that are absolutely false in the next podcast. I’m going to be talking a similar old wives tale about, can you have transplants from your sister or your brother or your family member, but it’s going to be a more expanded podcast about that topic. So that’s an old wives tale as well.