Monday, February 20, 2012

Male Pattern Baldness: Understanding and Accepting the Condition

We are all suckers for our hair. It defines us. We groom and style it to communicate different messages to others. We color, twist, braid, clip, and even spike it. It is a sign of virility, youth and strength. Human beings love their hair. For most people, the fear of losing the hair or going bald ranks right up there with death and dismemberment.

“I’m bald.” For some men to say those words is like admitting alcoholism for the first time. Men will play around with ridiculous comb-overs, toupees, and scalp spray paint before looking at themselves in the mirror and saying “I’m bald.”

Sometimes it is easier for a man to digest he has cancer than he is losing his hair. Along his journey he has probably hemorrhaged money on magic hair growth potions and pills, laser combs and herbal shampoos. Men will part with thousands of dollars just for the hope of hanging on to a few follicles.

Infomercials have largely replaced the greasy mustached man from the back of the wagon, pulling into town with hair tonic to peddle to the local rubes. Hair loss treatments are hocked everywhere by otherwise reputable companies and con artists alike. They are all bunk. If doctors really did discover a cure for hair loss (as I’ve seen advertised), I suspect you’d see no bald doctors.

One could fill a museum with contraptions that have been sold to desperate men for their balding scalps. Vacuum helmets to suck new hair to the surface, vibrating bands to stimulate blood flow, scalp massagers and shampoos to detoxify the scalp hurt nothing but men’s wallets.

Some of the more sinister treatments contained arsenic, mercury, and who knows what else. But perhaps no greater hoax was pulled on mankind than convincing men that powdered wigs could be fashionable. Something tells me there was a group of profiting balding men somewhere behind this.

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