Category: Other

In a recent comment on the blog, a reader brought up a term I wasn’t familiar with — cyberchondria — which is when a person will escalate their concerns about symptoms based on what they’ve read online. It seems like half the questions this blog gets are from cyberchondriacs, or rather, people who tend to play armchair doctor or fantasy biochemist when it comes to medicine and disease.

Have you noticed an increase in know-it-alls coming into your practice in recent years? It’s always good to educate yourself, but are we starting to get to a point where a doctor is just someone we need to see in order to get a prescription for something that we’ve already diagnosed ourselves with?

That is a good point. “Cyberchondria” is not only limited to BaldingBlog. With the rise of the Internet, doctors battle with patients that diagnose themselves on a day to day basis. Of course it is good to educate yourself, but I would think hypochondriacs and/or cyberchondriacs make for a formidable nightmare for a lot of doctors.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

Older people who take vitamin D supplements along with calcium may live longer than others, according to a new review of previous studies.

The researchers looked at data regarding the vitamin D intake of more than 70,000 adults in their 60s and 70s. They found that people who took vitamin D, along with calcium supplements, were 9 percent less likely to die over a three-year period, compared with people who took neither supplement.

However, they found that taking vitamin D alone had no effect on mortality rates.

For every 151 people who took with daily vitamin D and calcium for three years, one life would be spared, according to the researchers’ calculations.

Read the rest — Can taking vitamin D and calcium help you live longer?

A recent article published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism suggested that taking vitamin D and calcium reduces overall fracture rates, and as a side benefit seems to reduce overall mortality. The meta analysis was done in a pooled group of 70,528 patients. The average of the patients was 70 years old and 86% were women.

Snippet from the article:

Regis Corp said it will sell Hair Club for Men and Women, its hair loss products unit, to Japan’s Aderans Co Ltd for $163.5 million in cash, as it focuses on its salon operations.

The hair-salon operator, known for its Vidal Sassoon and Supercuts chains, is battling rising costs and slowing demand as frugal consumers take more time between haircuts.

The company has been exploring options for its non-core assets to cut costs and shore up its domestic business.

Read the rest — Regis sells hair loss chain for $163.5 million

We mentioned a month ago about some doctors objecting to a possible sale of Hair Club to Aderans (parent company of Bosley), but it appears that the sale has gone through.

We’re taking a day off to celebrate Independence Day. We hope everyone has a happy and safe July 4th!

Happy birthday, USA! We’ll be back here tomorrow.

Snippet from the article:

Last sum­mer a team of researchers from the Massa­chusetts Institute of Technology set out to better understand the effects of yogurt on obesity. They were following up on the results of a long-term study from the Harvard School of Public Health that had suggested yogurt, more than any other food, helped to prevent age-related weight gain. The M.I.T. team, led by cancer biologist Susan Erdman and evolutionary geneticist Eric Alm, wanted to replicate the work in mice. The researchers took a group of 40 males and 40 females and either fed the animals a high-fat, low-fiber, low-nutrient diet meant to mimic junk food or fed them standard mouse meals. They then supple­mented half of each diet group with vanilla-flavored yogurt.

Read the rest at Scientific American — Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles

Mice that eat more yogurt have bigger testicles, are more fertile, produce more frequent pregnancies, and generally healthier offspring. Researchers also saw that these mice had “10 times the active follicle density of other mice“. In humans, I would suspect that the larger testicles could add to the DHT problem, creating more balding in men.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

The human body is largely not human. It contains trillions of microbes that outnumber our own cells 10 to 1, affecting our health and behavior. Now, an international consortium of around 200 scientists has mapped this diverse microbial community at an unprecedented level of detail, and shown just how much it varies from person to person.

Read the rest in The Scientist — Microbial Menagerie

We (the scientific community) are accumulating massive amounts of data on what grows in our mouths and our gut, and learning that our guts contain a microbial menagerie of organisms that are different in each of us. They change within our guts often as mutations create variations in these bacteria. In disease, they are different than in normal people. We know that people with Chron’s disease and colitis have developed an “unhealthy” relationship with their gut bacteria.

We are also starting to believe that our gut bacteria may be useful in the diagnosis of impending problems in our health. Our bacteria carry out overlapping jobs, including creating and breaking down nutrients for us, and the population, even in newborns, may dictate the baby’s health. Babies show that microbiotic diversity changes very rapidly in the few days after birth, and the acquisition of unculturable bacteria expanded rapidly after the third day and probably contribute to the development of the baby’s immune system.

Some people proclaim that we are what we eat, but maybe we are what we grow and nurture inside our mouth and our gut, as much as what we eat.

Hi Doc,

If a cure for baldness does arise whIle this blog is still active, how would you choose to celebrate?

I’m not a drinker, but if a real hair loss cure were to come out, that would be a good reason to have a bash and get drunk in celebration.

Snippet from the article:

A group of doctors contracted by Hair Club for Men and Women, a unit of Regis Corp., is seeking to block the possible sale of the unit to Aderans Co., according to documents obtained by the Star Tribune.

In a recent letter to Regis Chief Operating Officer Eric Bakken, the doctors say they fear the Japanese hair company will eliminate Hair Club’s surgical business, their financial lifeblood, citing previous statements from Aderans executives.

Read the rest — 10 doctors try to derail Regis’ sale of Hair Club

If the sale should occur, it will reduce the 800 pound gorilla numbers from two to one. Aderans (owners of Bosley) purchased another hair transplant chain, Medical Hair Restoration, in 2007 and merged the two under the Bosley name a few years later.