Can you please make disclosures of your connections with manufacturers of Propecia?
I have no connection to Merck. I do not own any Merck stock and am not reimbursed in any way from them with regard to my medical activities. I do sell Propecia in my office, but it is sold at cost plus a handling and stocking fee of $4.32. I only sell Propecia as a service to our patients.
Hi, I am just wondering, I am balding and I want to get a short haircut just like the actor Jason Statham, what number do you think he takes when he buzzes his hair? Thank you very much. All the Best
Here’s a photo of Jason Statham I found on IMDB, for those that are interested in who we’re referring to. I don’t know the particular number clipper that he uses, but I’d suggest that you buzz your hair with a high number first (try a 6), then go one level down at a time until you get the look you want. This way you will not overdo it and lose your chance at your short haircut goal. If I had to estimate though, I’d say that he probably uses a #2 setting (just quess work).
As a doctor in the hair transplant field, I take affront to this blog, the general tone of it and your almighty view of ethics that you published last week. You are forgetting your roots. Your ego-centric sanctimonious approach gets me sick. I hope your readers can see your self-serving motives here and I sincerely hope that you become a victim of your words.
I normally would not publish this type of statement, but it looks like it illustrates the points I made in my blog entry from just last week, The Truth About Cheap Hair Transplants. I think that this doctor is forgetting his roots, which lie in the Hippocratic Oath taken when he became a doctor. Maybe his Mercedes and mansion mortgage burdens are clouding his priorities.
I’ve been reminded that my blog posting from way back in June entitled Doctor Availability, may have also contributed to this doctor’s rage.
I heard nick cage and travolta have hair transplants ,does anyone know what doctor they used? I want to find the best hair transplanter? I heard brazil?
I can not tell a good hair transplant patient from a normal person 95% of the time, even on a close up examination. The best hair transplant surgeons are those that use Follicular Units and adhere to the standards that have been set for Follicular Unit Transplantation. We have published those standards and they are available to read on the New Hair Institute website on the Medical Publications page.
As to your celebrity hair transplant questions, I can only speculate, as I have no first-hand experience with either actors. I would assume that Nicolas Cage was transplanted, because it appears that what he has on his head are the older type of smaller grafts, not the follicular units we use. Some times, people look transplanted even when they are not. If he was transplanted, then I did not do them (if I did, I could not comment on it because it would violate doctor/patient confidentiality). With regard to John Travolta, I have not done transplants on him either, so my best guess is that he found another great hair transplant surgeon, or never had them transplanted in the first place. I have only seen these two actors in films and some interviews that were public, so I might change my mind if I examined either of them in person and they then asked me to make that information public, a doubtful scenario at best.
Dr Rassman
Do you have a list of doctors in the US that use and are skillful with the Densitometer?
Thank you
Go to the ISHRS website to look up doctors who specialize in hair diagnosis, treatment or hair restoration. Good dermatologists should also fall into this category. When you call their offices, before you make the actual appointment, ask them if they map out the degree of miniaturization on the scalp for quantifying the extent of balding or thinning. That is a better probing question than asking about an instrument I invented, since other doctors may not know it by the actual name I gave it. (FYI, the U.S. Patent I obtained for this was U.S. Patent #5,331,472 ‘Method and apparatus for measuring hair density’, issued July 1994).
Just wanted to thank the readers of this blog one more time for helping to make BaldingBlog such a success. And on that note…
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
On October 31, 2005 you wrote a piece and appeared to criticize the marketing of some of the companies that you mentioned. You are high and mighty with your condemnation of these companies, yet you did the same thing by calling your company NEW Hair. Why are you any different than they are?
You are referring to my blog entry, Recapeen, FUE Plus & Lasers for Hair Loss?, in which I discuss the word “NEW” used in advertising. I may not like the tone of your question, but I relish tackling the answer. Marketing is not a bad word. The business community looks at marketing as the sum of product research (or service research), development of products and process, public education and advertising, and sales. The scope of what falls into marketing reflects the value of a product or service as it impacts the consumer.
You seem to be angry about my exploitation of the word NEW in our market branding for a hair transplant medical group. Well, putting aside the clever exploitation of a proven adjective in marketing, sales, and promotion of our service, I believe that the term NEW is appropriate for our business and the massive publications that led the world of hair restoration. I would direct you to the Medical Publications page on the New Hair Institute website, where we have posted the papers that originated much of what was NEW in hair transplant standards and now have become the standard of care today. Few terms would be more appropriate for our many contributions in this industry. We even pioneered an outspoken position on medical ethics, which was not a popular position to be in at the time. Please read Comparitive Shopping for Hair Restoration, Doctor Availability, and Low Laser Light Therapy, which I feel are all relevant to my answer.
I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of the readers of this site, especially those that have written in with questions and comments. This site was launched in April, 2005 with the simple goals of answering hair loss questions and educating people about hair restoration- and while the blog has achieved great success in helping people, the growth it has received in just over 6 months is beyond what I had imagined.
A few new things worth pointing out:
I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed the site thus far, and please remember that this site is updated every weekday with more hair loss questions and answers. If you’ve sent me a question that hasn’t appeared on this site yet, it will be posted as soon as possible. I’d love your feedback on potential new feature ideas for this site, or your thoughts on things that can be improved upon.
Once again, thank you for visiting.
I have been bald since I was 30. I am now 73. There was no hair to speak of (you call it a Class 6 Pattern according to your book). I finished my chemotherapy for prostate cancer and my hair grew back. Any comments?
The chemotherapy must have taken away your ability to make testosterone and it’s byproduct, DHT. That would account for a regrowth of your hair (as if your testicles were removed, in the chemical sense). It would be unusual to grow your hair back completely if you have been that bald for so many years (I’m assuming it has been at least 20 years), unless there was still hair present that was heavily suppressed by the testosterone you had circulating around. I would love to see before and after photos of your hair growth.
A wise sage in the field of hair restoration is Dr. Richard Shiell, from Australia. He was kind enough to allow me to use some random thoughts on some evolutionary aspects regarding hair evolution in the human species. This was part of an email interchange between Dr. Shiell and others in the hair restoration community. I personally always find his scope of knowledge and his wisdom quite insightful.
Hair certainly traps warmth in winter and acts as an insulator from the sun in summer but is this why we have it on our heads? It is very much like the question of “what came first- the dinosaur or it’s egg” (birds evolved from a small species of dinosaur).
Do hairy people migrate to geographical regions where they feel more comfortable or do people with more body hair have an evolutionary advantage and better breeding potential in colder climates? Does this also explain why native tropical races have very little body hair? Neither of these points explains why the females of homo sapiens have very little body hair, whatever their “race”.
The Tasmanoids who were the first of the homo sapien groups to come to Australia about 50,000 years ago had curly/kinky African type hair and very little beard growth or body hair. Did they elect to go to Tasmania, which is colder than the mainland or were they pushed there by subsequent migrating groups known by their bone structure as the “Robustus” group (20-30,000 years ago). The current native Aborigines with their big beards and skinny limbs are known as the “Gracile” Australoids. They have been here since before the last ice age melted some 10,000 years ago. Early photos of these Australian mainland aborigines (before interbreeding with white settlers) showed that they had massive beard growth, no baldness and very little body hair, perfect for a hot climate. The three separate races were all presumed to come from where Indonesia is today and to have walked across when sea levels were much lower during the various ice ages in the past 100,000 years. America’s first humans arrived the same way across what is now the Bering sea.
“Global warming” (and cooling) is nothing new and it is the speed of the current warming and whether human interference with nature is contributing to the warming, that is causing so much concern at present. I will stay out of that debate as it is highly political and results of “scientific research” is being used freely and wantonly by both sides! I hope that we can keep politics and religion out of the current hair debate but suspect that matters of sex will be difficult to avoid.
I used to tell my kids to take notes at the beach. When you saw a guy with a hairy back and shoulders he would invariably have a bald head or a hairpiece. This holds true most of the time but there are occasional exceptions indicating that the gene for hairy back and shoulders must be close to the one for type 6 baldness but is indeed a separate gene. Both characteristics are responsive to DHT as we know but while it acts like a fertilizer for scalp hair it causes reduction of shoulder hair in many guys.
Humans seem to have had an obsession with scalp hair since the dawn of recorded history. I guess it acts as a source of sexual attraction to the females of the species like the tail feathers of the male members of the peacock and bower birds families. It is not as all-pervading in humans as it is with birds where the bower-bird male with poor display misses out on the ‘action” almost completely. Consequently the tail feathers have evolved to enormous sizes. Human males can start breeding long before they lose their hair so it gives them a chance to get established in a family unit and as a provider before this sexually attractive feature is lost.
Almost any anatomical feature can be singled out by the opposite sex as a source of sexual attraction. The labia majora were naturally enlarged in the African Hottentot women and the women enlarged them further by dangling weight from both sides to form what was known by the early white settlers as the “Hottentot Apron”. It is not recorded if the white males found them equally attractive but after 6 months in the outback of South Africa, I guess they started to look pretty good !!
In turkeys the combs and throat skin has developed to crazy proportions and of course the posteriors of some species of monkeys are grotesquely red and enlarged. The nearest example of prominent hair growth in mammals that I can think of would be the mane of the male lion. Judging by the shampoo advertisements on TV and in the glossy magazines, hair is still a potent source of sexual attraction in homo sapiens.
