Many studies have documented how hair loss affects the sufferer’s quality of life. Not surprisingly, one study from the Netherlands assessing people with FPHL found that three quarters of them expressed negative self-esteem, and half said they experienced social problems. A further study from Toronto that set out to assess their quality of life found that 40 percent of the people were not satisfied with the way their current doctor managed their hair loss.

A recent study also looked at the psychological impact of alopecia. Their clinical review of thirty-four studies led them to report that not only do the psychological aspects of hair loss need to be taken into account by practitioners, but the efficacy of psychological treatments should be assessed for helping people cope with the disorder. They also said that physicians who provide treatment that is likely to be ineffective “may do more psychological harm than medical good.”

As there is little help for hair loss and few doctors seem to really “get it,” it is tempting to excoriate the entire medical profession and put the question of our hair loss outside the realm of normal medicine.

But where, exactly, does that leave us?

In my opinion, if we write off the help we may be able to get from doctors, two things happen:

• We are left with only one alternative: to seek out hair solutions on our own and possibly fall prey to those “hair specialists” who peddle unapproved treatments or continue to aid our quest in tilting at windmills for an elusive cure. These charlatans will certainly have success at growing something, but it will be their bank accounts, not our hair.

• We remain victims-victims of self-help books offering untried “cures” that may have worked for some but won’t work for all. When those remedies fail to work for us we blame ourselves and continue to think that somehow, something we did or didn’t do is at fault.

I’m reminded of the positive thinking movement that cropped up in the 1970s in relationship to cancer and other diseases. The premise was good-love yourself, meditate, don’t harbor negative thoughts, and practice visualization to attack the disease attacking your body. It certainly makes sense that disease is disease.

Unfortunately, cancer, like many other serious illnesses, cannot simply be wished away. While a good attitude, prayer, and meditation have been found to be important in helping maintain a healthful lifestyle and are particularly important to our quality of life, they are not a cure, even though they are likely an important part of the cure. We certainly know plenty of ornery people who survived cancer-and plenty of saints who died from it.

The same goes for some of the hair loss “cures” out there touted on Web sites that are outside the realm of the mainstream medical profession. These claim that your doctor isn’t trained in the disease, or worse, that your doctor is somehow holding back important information that only he or she knows, and you just don’t know the secret handshake to elicit the information.

Of course if someone knew how to cure baldness, the remedy wouldn’t be a secret shared only with a few or only found by those who happened across the information on a Web site. A viable treatment that could control, stop, or cure hair loss would be a potentially large cash cow. If there was a treatment that worked effectively for everyone, we’d all be only too happy to beg, borrow, or steal the money to pay for it. Sadly, when Web sites tout a particular remedy based on anecdotal or personal evidence that is not well documented, we part with our money, hoping it will work for us too.

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