Reversing Your Hair Loss - A Practical Scientific Guide

By Robert J. Hall

It is a sad fact that we will all lose our hair at some stage, even if only through old age. The real problem is when it happens to us before then. Very few people have any clear idea why premature thinning and loss occurs, but collectively we spend an extraordinary amount to try and reverse it. The hair restoration industry is worth more than ten billion US dollars per year. Yet, the alarming truth is that there is little to no regulation of the industry and most of the 'cures' simply do not work.

If you are concerned about your hair loss (and it does not matter whether you are young or old, male or female, completely bald or just thinning) then this book will almost certainly help you.

The first few chapters deal with hair itself; what it is and how it grows. Armed with the facts you can immediately start sorting truth from fiction regarding products and services.

The second section deals with actual hair-loss. From what we read and what we are told, we are generally led to believe that hair-loss is a single, time-driven, linear process that is as inevitable as it is simple. The truth is, though, that it most certainly none of these. Again, some parts may surprise you, whilst others may even shock you.

The last part deals with restoring your hair. Outlined in these chapters are therapies and supplements that can replace the current drug treatments on offer. Other therapies are highlighted that, if added to your existing routine, could make significant improvements to your overall strategy. Lastly, some of the therapies suggested have success rates touching over ninety percent just by themselves.

The very last chapter of the book highlights companies offering treatments that will be available in the very near future. These treatments promise complete regeneration of your hair, however long you may have been bald.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456620165

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Disclaimer

Before reading any more of this book you need to read this part. It is important and it has been placed here for a purpose.

Please read the medical disclaimer at the end of this section. It states that what I write in this book is not medical advice. You should take this disclaimer fairly seriously. Whichever way the material has been worded it has the precise intention of me simply saying what I would do if I were you, or what I have done myself in the past. You should not take anything written here, therefore, as telling you what you should do, ought to do or not do.

Since I have no access to your medical notes (and do not want any) and since you can give me no information regarding your medical status I am going to assume that you are a normal, middle-aged human in good health with no underlying medical issues. Middle-aged here means roughly anyone past puberty but younger than, say, eighty. Between these ages, this book might be of some benefit to you, if only for interest or future reference.

It also means that I have allowed myself to assume that you are a mentally healthy adult. You are, therefore, being given the opportunity to make your own mind up about any future course of action you may take.

I do not believe in a nanny state not because I am some kind of libertarian freak who thinks it is perfectly acceptable for anyone to play around with guns, drugs or dangerous animals without regard to the potential consequences for himself or his neighbours. No. My particular concern is that the regulatory authorities in every country and culture that I have ever examined have a fairly unhappy history of abusing their power, deliberately misinforming the people they are meant to serve and pursuing their own agendas; agendas that they would rather keep secret, moreover.

Putting it bluntly, I do not trust my own government to tell me the truth, nor do I trust any other government to do so either. That is why I believe in free speech and the concomitant freedom to listen to whomsoever I desire. The more people that feel the same way as I do, the more freedom I think we generate for ourselves and others. I hope you agree.

Disclaimer. All information contained within this book is exactly that; information. No information within this book constitutes, or should replace, medical advice pertinent to you. Any information within this book should be considered with regard to your own specific circumstances. All information is used, if at all, at your own risk and should be augmented with your own research and/or your own doctor’s advice.

Introduction

This is a book about hair-loss; more specifically, your hair-loss.

It is a fact that we will all lose our hair at some stage, even if only through old age. Many ninety year-olds have little hair, but they also have little muscle, porous bones, brittle fingernails, thin skin, no teeth and sometimes (worst of all) no memory. So the loss of hair at that age is perhaps nothing to be surprised about.

The real problem is when it happens to us before we reach that age. Even if you are female and never likely to go fully bald, the simple fact is that, statistically, you will lose at least some of your hair and probably suffer from it thinning long before that. If we start to lose our hair whilst still in our prime, it worries us. It actually worries us a great deal.

Very few people have any clear idea as to why this premature thinning and loss occurs, but collectively we spend an extraordinary amount to try and reverse it. The hair restoration industry is worth more than ten billion US dollars per year, and hair replacement surgery is that country’s fifth most popular cosmetic surgical procedure. Yet, the alarming truth is that there is little to no regulation of the industry and most of the ‘cures’ simply do not work.

If you are one of those people (male or female) who are not ninety, but nonetheless concerned about losing your hair, or if you have noticed that your hair is just becoming physically thinner and weaker or just growing more slowly, then this book is for you.

So, what is inside? Well, the book is in three sections. The first deals with hair itself; what it is and how it grows. Some of the information may come as a surprise to you. With the facts, however, you can immediately start sorting truth from fiction with regard to hair products and services.

The second section deals with hair-loss. It cuts through the myths and falsehoods surrounding the whole process of losing one’s hair. Again, some parts may surprise you, whilst others may even shock you. Whatever your reaction, however, you will probably never think about your thinning hair and its eventual loss in quite the same way again.

The third part deals with your hair’s restoration. From what we read and what we are told, we are generally led to believe that hair-loss is a single, time-driven, linear process that is as inevitable as it is simple. The truth is, though, that it most certainly none of these. There are various factors involved even in the most straightforward cases of hair-loss, each of which can be mitigated. The fact is that hair-loss is a fairly complex biological process, but one that has finally become reasonably well-understood. So, at this point, you will start to find out what you can do to both stem and then actually reverse your hair-loss, both practically and scientifically.

Outlined in the various chapters are therapies and supplements that can replace the current drug treatments on offer. Other therapies are highlighted that, if added to your existing routine, could make significant improvements to your overall strategy. Lastly, some of the therapies suggested have success rates touching over ninety percent even though used entirely alone.

The very last chapter of the book highlights companies offering treatments that will be available in the very near future. These treatments promise complete regeneration of your hair, however long you may have been bald.

Section One

Chapter One

Truth and Lies

Before reading the rest of this book, you need to understand the following information. Not just read it, but fully grasp what you are being told.

The hair-loss industry in the Western world alone is currently worth in excess of ten billion US dollars a year. And this is a very great deal of money. And all you have to do to get a slice of it is to tell a few lies that cannot be proven to be lies, or sell a product that cannot absolutely be proven to be useless. And this is exactly what happens, every day of the week, week in and week out.

Hair-loss companies and clinics will always want to be seen as reputable, honest, sincere and scientific ‘trichology clinics’ or some such similar type of establishment. It makes it much easier to part you from your money if you believe they know what they are talking about and can actually do something about your condition. Calling themselves ‘Vanity Hair Scams Ltd’ for instance would be very unlikely to achieve the same result.

However, you should understand that these clinics, their staff and their treatments are almost completely unregulated. In other words, no-one is on your side and no-one is looking out for you. Furthermore, never forget that despite reassuring you that your health and welfare are their prime concern the truth is that their only motive is profit and that, by making them any sort of approach, you immediately give yourself away as an easy target for them. They advertise themselves to you and you, in turn, unwittingly advertise yourself to them. You are in effect posting them a gilt-edged invitation to take money directly from your pocket with no concurrent guarantee of success or satisfaction.

This is not a case of a few charlatans putting on white coats and selling bottles of home-made snake oil from the back of the modern-day equivalent of a horse and cart. This whole criminal charade involves the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies, private clinics and university-level educational institutes.

All is not lost, though. This is because there are in existence home treatments that will do the same as commercial cutting edge treatments and have been known to do so for years. The purpose of this book is to bring them to your attention and delineate between those that work and those that do not. Some treatments will fall between these two positions and achieve somewhat limited success; but, in each case, where there are undesirable side effects, these will be strongly highlighted.

Having said this, virtually all the home therapies, supplements, protocols and equipment outlined in this book will have attached to them negative reviews and cautions by apparently knowledgeable and reputable third parties. Rather than take any such reviews at face value, however, you should bear the following points in mind at all times.

The first thing you should understand is that unless specific figures are given, with specific, checkable references attached to them, you should not attach much weight, if any, to any alleged side effect. In any court of law such evidence would be inadmissible; classed as simple ‘hearsay’. The qualification of the person reporting the alleged shortcomings of a supplement may be suspect. They may be connected with the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory authorities, or a just a commercial competitor. Without comprehensive substantiation any reported ‘fact’ can only be treated with grave suspicion. Even in regular, informal conversation, how much credibility is ever really attached to something a friend of a friend said? The answer is, of course, very little.

The second thing that you should give absolutely no weight to is any statement that says anything along the lines of ‘no clinical trials have taken place’, or, ‘has yet to be proven’ etc. Although quite possibly true, these statements lack something that, again, would render them inadmissible as evidence in court. What they lack is proper context, and it is this consideration that prompts courts to demand that you tell the whole truth and not just the selections that the prosecution would like the jury to hear.

Since the whole story has not been told the fact that clinical trials have not taken place and the statements pointing out that fact are misleading. In other words the truth has been turned into a lie.

The reason why no clinical trials have been done, nor ever will be done, on a substance called polysorbate, for instance, is that such trials are expensive. However, even if it were known that the trials would prove to be a fabulous success, with those using polysorbate suddenly finding their hair growing to such an extent that they needed to get their hair cut once a fortnight, this expense still forms the one overriding reason why they would not be undertaken.

The problem is that polysorbate is a natural product and cannot, therefore, be patented. This fact alone ensures that polysorbate will never be clinically tested in any commercial setting. Why not? Well, because it cannot be patented there would be absolutely no chance of those commissioning the trials recouping their expenses. All that would happen is that they would have armed their sales department as well as that of their competitors with extra information and brighter sales prospects. These competitors would then be in a better position than the funding company financially, of course, because, unlike them, they did not spend their money on the trials.

Put very simply, any company that funded any clinical trials would suddenly start losing the commercial war with its rivals. It would, in all probability, be the last mistake the company’s board ever made because the company would go into liquidation within months. It is precisely because of this inescapable economic law that the patent process and intellectual property laws were devised.

Lastly, the third thing generally missing from the portfolio of evidence against any particular therapy is the comparative weight of all the relevant risks. They get ignored. For example, if someone told you that they were worried about the cancer risk from eating bread crusts (and studies have been carried out on exactly this topic) then they are clearly obsessively micro-managing a virtually non-existent problem. This is not to say that the risk is not there, that it is not quantifiable and that it is not possible to do anything about it (there is - do not eat bread crusts, obviously). What needs to be understood, however, is that the risk exists at about the same magnitude, say, as getting cancer from fluorescent