Slaphead Science: A Brief History of Baldness Cures

Closer to home, health-food stores market vitamin and minerals to promote hair growth. These are all worthless too. Rapid, unexpected hair loss is certainly a sign of deteriorating health. By all means, see a doctor if this is happening to you. But if you are bald or thinning, your hair loss is almost certainly not a result of your diet, your circulation, your clogged pores, your poor chi, your reliance on commercial shampoos, your yin, your yang, your repulsion of goat urine, or your fondness for McDonald's hamburgers. Rather, someone in your family - maybe a generation or two ago - was bald.

There is hope. Usually, hair follicles never "die" until very late in human life. Bald individuals have very tiny hairs in most of those 100,000 follicles. If the right drug comes along, those same hair follicles can start producing longer, thicker hair.

Hair transplants take hair, root at all, from the back and side of the scalp and move it up top. This works, no myth here, but the procedure can be painful and expensive. Having a skilled doctor is key to its success.

I say the word "hope" because baldness is a great concern to many people. Ladies, don't you snicker about the guys. This is no vain pursuit. Twenty percent of women have thinning hair and 5 percent loose it in clumps around the crown, just like men. And it's a real big deal for them, too.

Very soon, perhaps within a decade, scientists predict, there will be a drug that spurs head hair growth. At first it will likely have some ridiculous side effect, like impotency or hypertension. Then, after a few more years, the kinks in the drug will be worked out. Researchers know what causes hair to stop growing; and pharmaceutical companies are pouring millions of dollars into drug development because they know the anti-baldness pill will be as big as Viagra.

Now, Click Here for our Special Hair Fact File! for Twenty Great Hair Facts

Christopher takes great pleasure in de-bunking and de-mystifying medical 'wisdom' on such topics as vitamin O, magnets and oxygen in his new book 'Bad Medicine' published by Wiley. Christopher Wanjek, MPH (Masters in Public Health, from Harvard) is a U.S.-based science journalist and author of the book "Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed" (Wiley, 2003). Of which Baldness is just one of over forty fun topics discussed! Available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com