Moving Beyond the Hair Loss, Men

Hair loss is a fact of life for most men 35 and older. And male pattern baldness makes up a whopping ninety-five percent of men who are losing hair. But such does not make it any easier for the guy trying to just eek out a living and pay off his bills. Every day he is bombarded with images of unrealistic expectations of guys who are his age and who have already gotten it all–the career, the car, the house, the gal, and yes, the look of eternal youth. You see them wherever you go, whether it’s at the checkout line in the grocery store or during the football game. Youth and stamina are all an unspoken right to manhood. So hair loss hits a guy pretty hard, especially when he’s not prepared for it.

Okay, so define male pattern baldness or MPB. What is it and how do I know that I have it? Well, fortunately it’s not that hard to tell. It’s is usually diagnosed visually, just as a doctor would diagnose that you have a head cold from your physical symptoms of a runny nose, swollen lymph nodes and tonsils and an inflamed throat. Another way you can tell is by looking at your family history. Did your dad or grandfather have MPB? If you have a family history of it and you’re are following the pattern which I will describe below, then you have male pattern balding.

To know if you have been the unwitting victim of male pattern baldness, you can do several things. You can get an analysis from your local skin doctor (dermatologist) who will scrutinize the size of your hair follicles with a magnifying instrument (densitometer). (You start losing hair when your hair follicles shrink and ultimately close up from an inherent sensitivity to the DHT chemical you are producing.) Or you might visit a hair loss clinic for a scalp biopsy to diagnose the cause of your thinning. But before you do, you should know that this analysis is limited to analyzing poison-induced hairloss. It is most unusual to be balding from lead or arsenic poisoning in the first place. And poisoning does not lead to male pattern hair loss.

But you don’t have to wait for an appointment to ascertain whether or not you have MPB. You can see for yourself if your balding is, in fact, MPB by comparing it to the standard Norwood Scale. This is a great tool for accurately diagnosing male pattern baldness, and it will also prevent you from misdiagnosing your hair loss. Basically the Norwood Scale is a collection of diagrams showing the progression of the condition. Initially your hair will recede along the front of the hairline from the temples to the top. Soon you will also realize that another bald spot is showing at the crown of your head. Your hair thinning will continue from both ends working inward until there is just a thin band of hair separating the two sections, and ultimately you will have hair only around the sides and back of your head.