Dr. Rassman, with all due respect I found your response to the poor woman who asked for help re Femara and Hair loss, to be incredibly insensitive and dismissive. Didn’ t you read her history? Obviously her priority has been and continues to be, cancer, but doesn’t she deserve to look and feel good about herself, with a FULL head of hair?! Because to date, Femara has been so effective in preventing breast cancer recurrence, I am sure you’ll be receiving more requests for help to reverse or ease, the hair loss side effect. I suggest you do some research yourself and try to help us, rather than lecture us on priorities and then pass the buck back to oncologists. Believe me, as a 54-year old woman who has also gone through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, Tamoxifen and now Femara (9 months) all with a great deal of hope and grace, what an insult it is, to be losing my hair AGAIN, along with a host of other debilitating side effects, that are destroying my quality of life. Good information from you or your colleagues, would be most welcome.
You’re referring to my post from a couple months ago, Femara and Female Hair Loss.
I do not treat cancer and certainly do not have direct knowledge of the various chemotherapeutic drugs that are used. Hair loss is usually a secondary consideration when treating a cancer. Of course, most doctors would love to find an equally effective anti-cancer drug that has no hair loss as a side effect, but that does not seem to happen very often.
Quality of life is often balanced in the treatment of cancer with the effectiveness of the drugs used to control recurrence. Doctors are very focused on the cancer and feel that side effects like hair loss are less important in the “war against cancer recurrence”. I do understand where you are coming from and my heart does go out to you. I recently reviewed a drug that was designed to treat hair loss associated with cancer chemotherapy, but I signed a non-disclosure agreement, which means I can’t speak about it because the company was concerned that:
- The drug was not FDA approved yet
- The effectiveness was yet to be proved scientifically (they started down that path)
- Any release of information could risk their FDA approval status
I liked what I saw and knew well how this type of drug would impact people like the woman on the referenced blog post. I would welcome the chance to become a source of good, reliable information if I had it. Unfortunately, although I care a great deal about this problem, my practice is not focused on the treatment of hair loss from cancer chemotherapy. I’m sorry if you feel that my answer was insensitive, but I did not intend it to be as such.
Paid advertisements (not an endorsement):
Nizoral is a good shampoo, but it won’t do anything to regrow your hair. I’ve addressed the side effects questions many, many times before on the blog — the most vocal are the ones with complaints. There are hundreds of thousands of men that use the drug that don’t spend all day on forums discussing it in a positive or negative way. Also, the complaints are unsubstantiated — I could say that Propecia grew a 6th finger on my left hand and made my skin turn silver, and how are you going to disprove that? The FDA published that the side effects occur in less than 2% of men.