Hair Regrowth Without Surgery

William Clearfield, D.O., FAAMA, DABMA, FAARFM

Medical Director, Clearfield Family Medicine, Reno, NV; Executive Director, American Osteopathic Society of Rheumatic Diseases

By age 60, 65% of men and 80% of women, 56 million in the US alone, experience noticeable hair loss. Conventional wisdom dictates that the vast majority of hair loss is due to genetics. Nevertheless, as we have seen with so many other accepted scientific myths (does testosterone cause prostate cancer ring a bell?), what is accepted science many times just is not so. We begin with what is “normal,” the natural lifecycle of a single hair. From there, we extrapolate root causes of the three types of hair loss. 1. Androgenic alopecia, by far the most common, is typically thought of as “male pattern bald-ness.” 2. Alopecia areata is the loss of hair in discrete circular to oval areas in the scalp. 3. Telogen effluvium patients lose their mane from the metabolic components, thyroid disease, hormonal imbalances, other androgens, infections, immune-compromised hosts, stress, medications, or crash dieting. We review the patterns, including how to recognize them. We then propose treatment solutions for each hair type. We reveal what to do with the 30% “mixed” types. These are hair loss types that over-lap patterns. Lastly, we review diet and lifestyle changes we can enact to improve our chances of re-growing hair.