Sick Hair Vs. Vellus Hair
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As everyone knows hair loss is something that occurs from thick terminal hairs to thinner Vellus hairs, to baldness. And that’s the process of hair loss that occurs in androgenetic Alopecia are male pattern baldness, as well as in female pattern baldness where the hair is over time, miniaturize become thinner see-through and then those hairs eventually go to a complete baldness. And when it becomes complete baldness, those hairs are harder to, uh, resuscitate or bring back. But when they’re at the Vellus stage, they’re have a higher chance of regressing back toward a better state using medical therapy. What this podcast is talking about is not the nuances of the vellus hair, nor is it talking about all the medical therapies or hormonal evaluations that can be done for both men and women. But it’s something that I’ve noticed now over the last year or so that is different from just vellus hairs.
I like to call it sick hair. And essentially when I look at hair, I can tell if the hair is sick and when the hair looks sick, it is to me, an independent phenomenon than just miniaturized hairs. Now, what the heck does this mean? Can I quantify it? Not really the hairs to me, don’t just look Vallus, but they look sort of lifeless. They look brittle and they look sort of collapsed. They’re not necessarily broken shafts, but they just don’t look healthy. Usually what that indicates to me is that the body is not healthy. There’s something else going on with the body. And so when I see hair that looks sick, I usually refer it out to someone that can help me. The two people that I usually refer to, you know, I have a wellness building. One is a cupping expert, QC Stone. Who’s in my building upstairs.
And cupping sounds crazy. But you know, you think about when Chinese look at the tongue, they can see if someone’s sick inside their body while cupping also, if done right, can actually relieve a lot of the toxins that are sick in the body, it’s actually helped me tremendous amount. And so when I look at hair that doesn’t look healthy. Yes, I can do. I can do a topical therapies to help it. I can do oral therapies to help, but I can do all those things. I can even do hair transplants in some cases, but oftentimes if it’s just sick hair, it needs a deeper therapy that is to release your body’s unhealthiness. And so either through the Asian method of cupping which I really, really advocate as one methodology that I recommend or the other is functional medicine, functional medicine is basically doctors.
If you think about they usually say, okay, your hormones are a normal range. So therefore you need no therapies. You’re good enough. Go home. Bye bye. Your test is pretty normal. Your estrogen is normal. Your iron levels are pretty normal, maybe slightly low, but functional medicine doctors say, well, normal is an arbitrary definition we can optimize because if you think about it as a Western doctor, I’ve been trained in a way to say, okay, if you don’t have diabetes, then you’re, well, well, not necessarily. You could be very toxic. And so the Western side of things says, we can optimize your hormonal levels either through exophthalmos or external hormone therapies or other things. So whether you subscribe to the Asian or the Western, I subscribe to both. Although I lean toward the Asian, maybe because I’m Asian, even though I’m Western trained, I believe that our bodies can heal themselves without a lot of medical therapy.
Those are things that I look for. And how do you define this? Can your doctor look at this and say, Oh, you have sick hair. I don’t know. It’s only something in the last year I’ve really begun to focus on. So it’s not even, and I’ve been in practice almost 20 years. So it’s something that I don’t even, I can’t even tell you, but I look at hair and I can tell when something someone’s sick inside their body. And that’s important so that you factor that in and not just say, well, my doctor told me I’ve just some miniaturized hairs and give me some Propecia, well, that could help you. And even if it does help you, it doesn’t mean that your body’s not sick. So that can be another reason why there’s hair loss. Actually, an example is, I was watching this movie, Identical Strangers, or Three Identical Strangers.
And that was about triplets that were separated at birth. And then they got older and they finally found each other. And it was really interesting when I watched this movie, which probably none of you even notice if you did see this movie, it was all three of the brothers who identical triplets had completely different hair loss patterns. And I’ve seen this so often I do a lot of hair transplants on identical twins. I have actually, haven’t not done triplets, but I’ve done identical twins and not fraternal twins, truly identical twins. And I’ve noticed that they actually have very different hair loss patterns. So if they’re genetically identical and we’re attributing this to genetics and one doesn’t look 400 pounds and one looks one 50, but if you look at them, you probably couldn’t tell them apart, but there’s a difference. There’s got to be some epigenetic issue or some other issue that we are missing. I think it’s due to health and slight, for example, one of the brothers out of this, three triplets was a smoker and being a smoker actually made it so that I think his hair loss was worse. So hopefully this podcast, makes sense in terms of understanding something beyond just miniaturization of hair.
