Tomatoes and Hair Loss

Have you ever heard of tomato consumption causing hair loss?

TomatoNo, I have never heard that before.

Here are some interesting facts about tomatoes that I’ll repost from Epersimmons.com:

  1. Tomatoes originated in the South American Andes. They were cherry sized and grew wild. The tomato was once considered an aphrodisiac, and in fact the word tomato in Italian is poma amoris or “love apple”.
  2. It’s hard to believe that this main ingredient of our diet was not that long ago considered poisonous, by Americans. We have Robert Gibbon Johnson to thank for saving the tomato. In 1820, he stood on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse and ate a tomato, proving they were harmless. Thank you Robert, after all where would we be without ketchup for our french fries.
  3. Today, far from being poisonous it is considered one of the most healthy vegetables around. And yes, I did say vegetable. In 1893, the Supreme Court ruled that tomatoes are vegetables and not fruits.

I was told that I did not have enough donor hair, what can I do?

I am not sure why you don’t have enough donor hair. I will assume that you had already exhausted your donor area and now want more hair or more fullness. This can be achieved with beard hair but it may have a different characteristic than your scalp hair. Body hair is a poor choice as it has less quality. I recommend Scalp MicroPigmentation as a good alternative for more fullness.

See here: https://scalpmicropigmentation.com/gallery/

https://scalpmicropigmentation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/new_hair_institute-scalp_micropigmentation-patient_photo-027b-thinning_hair-wm.jpg

not enough donor

Today’s Man – How Much is Enough Hair?

Part 1 of “How Much is Enough Hair?” showcased a patient in his mid-20s. The patient below in part 2 is in his mid-50s and achieved wonderful results.

The change in my appearance in just 8 months has been remarkable. From a balding man that I hated to look at in the mirror, to a younger man who looks like he has a full head of hair has changed my life. My friends can’t get over it and even though everyone knows that I have had a hair transplant, no one believes it when they look at me. The back of my head is still bald. Can I expect to fill that in as well?

I loved seeing you the other day. Every time I see one of our patients with the right hair and skin color and the right hair texture, I feel that the work we do in restoring hair is almost like God’s work. Another session will probably suffice to fill in the back and when done in combination with some styling effort, you will look like a man with a full head of hair. I recommend another 3000 or so grafts be placed into your crown. Thanks for allowing me to use you questions and picture for my blog.

When looking at these pictures, please note that the hair line is not a line but an irregular zone of hair. It does not have a start point and you can not connect the dots. Note that behind this zone, the hair is thick and you can not see through it, while in the zone, the hair is subtle in its appearance and does not hit you like a wall when you look at it. There is a smooth transition from the forehead (without hair) to the thick lush hair sitting back about 1/2 inch behind the transition zone. That means that you can not tell that it is a transplanted hair line, just like mine or other normal people that do not bald.

This first set below are his before photos (Norwood Class 5), taken in December, 2004.



The following are his after photos (one procedure of 2,773 grafts), taken in August, 2005.




Today Show Tells How Women Can Stop Hair Loss

Every bit of information educates the public. Interesting reading.

From the article —

We normally have, on average, 100,000 hairs on our scalp. And as evinced by our changing hair lengths, roots and visits to our hairdressers, those hairs grow; in fact, 90 percent of our hair is actively growing at any given time. Hair is the second fastest growing tissue in our body after (I’d love for you to guess) … bone marrow.

Read the full article by Dr. Judith Reichman: Today – What women can do to stop hair loss


2007-12-05 13:43:22Today Show Tells How Women Can Stop Hair Loss

A 1990 Hair Transplant Horror Story That I Had To Tell Which May Yet Have a Happy Ending

Can you imagine that you go see a doctor because you are losing your hair. You are young and you believe in modern medicine and in doctors. You take the courageous step to improve your look and get your hair back to look younger. You have already lost too much hair and fear that you will lose it all. Then you go to the doctor’s office who advertised with the strong suggestion that one can get their hair back by having a hair transplant. Then he sees pictures in the newspapers, even a few ads on TV and in magazines. He went to one of those advertised doctors and met a man in a white coat that he thought was the doctor, but he quickly finds out that he is not a doctor. The man tells him that he came to the right place. “Dr. T can give you back all of your ‘luxurious’ hair and you will never have to worry about it again” says the man. The year is 1990, before Propecia was available (which means that his hair loss would continue even more rapidly after the transplant). This man in the white coat introduces him to the doctor and he seemed personable enough. After all, with his white coat and his name clearly displaying ‘Herbert T, M.D.’ he clearly presents with authority. He recommends hair transplants and a series of simple surgeries called scalp reductions (removing the bald spot from the back of his head).

Then he starts the process and after one surgery he starts doubting that this is going to work out so he go back to Dr. T three weeks from the date of surgery and he tells him how nicely he are doing and the scabs on his head will disappear in a few weeks. He then tells him that he scheduled you for your first scalp reduction surgery, two months later that while he is waiting for the hair to grow out which normally takes 8 months. “After all, he only transplanted the front of his head and had to deal with the top and crown area”, said the doctor. At this new scalp reduction surgery, the removed part of the bald area in the top and back of his head. That simple surgery is not quite as simple as the doctor said and he has a lot of pain following the surgery. He got to a mirror and saw the scar down the middle of his head and now became more concerned than ever. So again, he goes to visit Dr. T. This time 4 1/2 months following his transplant surgery, the doctor tells him that he is doing fine but that there was still more bald scalp that had to be removed, so the doctor schedules him again for another scalp reduction surgery. He agrees. Then after 2 more months, he noticed a red scar down the middle of his head that seems to have stretched, so he goes back to Dr. T again and he tells him that he still needs a third surgery to remove the rest of the bald area along with scar that formed. After that third scalp reduction, he is now starting to get concerned. Four surgeries (one hair transplant and 3 scalp reductions). Now he waits anxiously until 8 months later when the hair starts growing. At first he gets excited, but then the pluggy nature of his dark brown hair grafts start showing. So again, he goes back to Dr. T who then tells him that it will take two to four more hair transplant surgeries to fill in between the brown hair plugs so it does not look so pluggy. Now he is not trusting the doctor anymore because he never told him that he would look pluggy and needed more surgeries. Where was that luxurious hair that was represented? So he gets a second opinion and he meets Dr. Fredrick W who confirms that he needs at least 4 more surgeries to makes the original work look normal.

Between the terrible plugs of the early 90s, and the three scalp reductions, he had a pluggy look created by his dark brown hair spaced by bare white scalp skin, like a corn field. The scalp reduction scar ran down the middle of his head, the scar stretched and anyone could see it. Over and over again, he repeats this process with Dr. Y and then Dr. Z and a few other doctors until he reached 13 surgeries in 4 years. Imagine 13 surgeries and having to wear a hat to hide the deformities on his head. Can you believe that his faith in doctors allowed him to go down the garden path created by immoral doctors who took his money and cared nothing about him? I am ashamed of those doctor who were nver honest with him and continued to rip him off for money and worse, continue the deforming surgeries repeatedly over and over again, making promises they could never meet. No one ever told him where reality was.

I asked him why he had so many doctors and why he put up with failures upon failures. He said there was no internet in those days and each time he saw a new doctor and they looked at him, they told him that they could fix him because other doctors messed him up. Just another false start here and there. He even flew to Chicago to see another ‘experienced’ doctor. He found that during the surgery a doctor doing his first hair transplant procedure did the surgery, supposedly supervised by the senior doctor at the Chicago office who never came into the surgery room.

If I were him, I would have sued all of the doctor, everyone of them, but the statue of limitations had expired and he was left to live his life under a hat. It impacted him in every social setting one can imagine. He couldn’t go swimming because he would have to take his hat off. He felt shame, but it was the doctors who should have felt shame. It must have cost him a fortune as his doctors made off like bandits. Patients like this just don’t sue their doctor because they feel so much shame and going before a jury of his peers would make them feel even more shame.

Now with that said, last week we put together a plan on how to fix him. The plan was simple. I told him what I wanted to do but there was a risk that I could not implement the plan I wanted because his donor hair was very depleted. The goal was to try to rebuild a normal hairline and put hair into and around the scar and also place it to the sides of the scar if we got out enough hair to accomplish this goal. It was risky and we both knew it. But he agreed to take the risk. Then, after the surgery, with great surprise, we succeed beyond what I had expected and harvested 1550 grafts, enough to produce a normal hairline with enough hair left over to sparsely cover the scar area going down the center of his head (from the three scalp reduction).

Over the past 24 years that I have been in this business, I have had well over 1000 patients like this man. I was able to fix many of them (see: https://newhair.com/photos/patient-ul/ and https://newhair.com/photos/patient-vi/) but not all of them. In eight months, I am planning to perform scalp micropigmentation on him to hide all of the scars and give him a good base for a totally new look. Scalp micropigmentation (see: https://scalpmicropigmentation.com) gives me a tool that I have never had before so now I am more confident than ever that I can help him achieve a normal look with only some minimal styling modifications. I am anticipating that for the first time in 25 years, he will take off his hat and even go for a swim if he want to. In 10 months, I anticipate that I will post his before and after pictures here on Baldingblog.com along with a reference to this post and a statement from him (which he indicated he would make about his view of his result).

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Tocotrienol?

Hi Doc,

thanks for your awesome website.

I stumbled across this article – Take this vitamin to halt hair loss

and this website – Tocotrienol.org

What can you comment about this? Would love to hear your comments. Thank you!

There are always new products that come out claiming to be hair loss cures. This is one of them. I cannot say if Tocotrienol works or not, but here are some things to keep in mind when doing your own research. Read the report carefully. Find out how many subjects were in the study group. Is it 10,000 or is it only 10? There is a difference, right? In this case, the study was 38 people. Ask if there was a financial or marketing incentive. Find out if the report was published in a well-respected journal (and realize that even if it is in a published journal, it does not necessarily mean it is good study).

Tocotrienol is an herbal vitamin E treatment, and I really have no significant comment to give other that “buyer beware”.

Tittering my finasteride, does it work?

Just coming back to leave an anecdote of my experiences on fin, as I remember how useful I found these sorts of posts in the past. I’ve been on fin 2.5 years now. I was initially on the recommended dosage of 1mg until just before the 2 year mark sides started to appear in my life (loss of libido, morning wood, slight feeling of emotional numbness/dissociation). I decided to drop down to 0.5mg and it has honestly been the best move I could have imagined. A lot of posts that I read seemed to suggest that this would not make any difference but by god has it. Im now roughly 6 months on from changing dose and I feel virtually as I did pre fin.. and my hair is still going strong as ever (way way thicker than pre fin). If you change dose what I would say is just ‘patience’. It probably took around 3 months after changing for my body to ‘stabilize’ but I’m fairly certain now I’ve just found a dose that works for me.

Reducing the dose from 1mg to half the dose will decrease the effects by only 20% but you should work with your doctor on this plan. What is your Personalized Master Plan?

Tissue Expansion

Hello Dr. Rassman,

I have read in a few your blog responses about a procedure called Tissue Expansion involving the insertion and inflation of a balloon into the scalp to create new tissue allowing for a effective scar reduction. Are you familiar w/ patients w/ HT scars that have used TE and if so have they been successful?

I’m interested in learning more about this procedure and it’s viability. I live in LA – would it be possible for you to refer a Dr. who perfroms TE?

Thank you for your insight.

I would be happy to see you myself, where I would first assess your scarring problem. One must command the problem before recommending a proper treatment. I have been involved with tissue expansion for the past few years, but it is not the solution for everyone. If I can not manage the process, my ego would not get in the way; I would then refer you to an appopriate expert, that is, if you needed another opinion. First, let’s start with a visit to my Los Angeles office. Please call 800-NEW-HAIR to setup a free consultation.