Health Info

You are reading this online. You therefore know there are many sites allowing you to buy medication without the need to get a prescription from your doctor. All you need do is answer a medical questionnaire designed to check you can take this drug without serious risk. As an aside, you should always answer the questionnaire honestly. The questions are there for your own protection. That said, doctors are not completely redundant. Let us be clear. The process for self-diagnosis of hair loss is routine. You look in the mirror and see fallen hairs around the house. You want to prevent baldness and the drug used to prevent it is well known. Ordering online is reasonably safe. But there may be reasons to go see your doctor if there are other symptoms. Let us assume you are losing clumps of hair and also not feeling well.

There may be a serious underlying disease or disorder if you have one or more of the following symptoms:

• fever;


• moderate to severe pain;


• loss of concentration, confusion or other signs of mental disorder;


• difficulty in breathing;


• loss of appetite and weight loss;


• increase of appetite and weight loss (which may be more particularly associated with an overactive thyroid);


• either extreme of constipation or diarrhea;


• vomiting; or


• obvious blemishes, bruising or marks on the skin.

Depending on the extent of the fever and degree of pain, it may be appropriate to treat any combination of these symptoms as justifying emergency treatment.

This set of circumstances has moved you outside the conventional hair loss situation. The issue now is to diagnose the disease or disorder so you will be pitched into the usual round of lab work, x-rays, scans, etc. Once a diagnosis is confirmed, the doctors will be able to advise you on whether treatment of that disease or disorder will restore hair growth on its own. For example, if the diagnosis is thyroid disease, the standard drug therapies restore hair growth without the need for any additional specific treatment. But if the diagnosis is a cardiovascular problem, hair loss is a standard side-effect to the use of blood thinners. In other words, the problem is going to get worse before it gets better.

In many cases, the only remedy will be concealment. If you cannot face the world without hair, you will be looking at the use of a wig or hairpiece. If you make a good physical recovery from the disease or disorder, but hair is slow to begin growing again, you can ask your doctor about propecia which limits the production of hormones preventing hair growth. In some cases, propecia will be useful. However, you may have to consider surgery if drugs have proved ineffective. Transplanting plugs of hair or individual follicles from one part of your scalp to another can produce some evening of effect between areas of thick growth and bald areas. Slightly more extreme is scalp rotation which works well for younger but not older patients.

The most common cause of hair loss is your age. Whatever you do, whatever medications or other treatment you may try, your hair will thin and slowly drop out as you are becoming older. Using some kinds of drugs will slow this process but, sooner or later, age will win. That said, the most usual causes for loss not accompanied by any other medical symptoms are poor nutrition, stress, and some hair styles and treatments. If you are taking medication for some other condition, hair loss can be a side-effect. For these, you simply need to apply common sense, be patient and the problem will be resolved. Where drug interactions may be the problem, you need to take the advice of your doctor on whether to change the dosage or try different drugs.

However, because all the required chemical reactions are dependent on the free flow of blood to the capillaries supplying each follicle, anything that interferes with the flow or changes the composition of the blood can cause hair loss. Taking physical interference first, arteriosclerosis is the slow loss of volume through the blood vessels. One of the more common causes is high levels of cholesterol in a poor diet as excess platelets build up as deposits on vessel walls. Heavy smoking has the same effect. This will be accompanied by high blood pressure and possible symptoms suggesting heart problems such as angina. As to the chemical composition of the blood, many conditions can affect the hormone balance. An overactive or underactive thyroid gland may cause hair to fall out. The standard treatments for thyroid disease usually restore hair growth. In women, excess levels estrogens may need to be corrected to stop the hair loss. If oral contraceptives are being used, different dosages or a different method of birth control will often restore growth.

In more serious cases, people may be looking at hair loss as a first symptom of cancer. This may be a malignant tumour or cancer of the blood including lymphoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma. Ironically, the treatments using chemo- and radiotherapy remove the rest of the body hair. In slightly less serious cases, the problems may be liver or kidney disease, skin diseases such as lupus and major infections like syphilis. In all these cases, you must either bear with the hair loss or, in combination with any other medication prescribed by your doctor, take propecia. This will help to maintain the status quo except for the more radical treatments which cause stress and hair loss. Whether you do decide to take this drug depends on how important your physical appearance is while you are sick. In many cases, you may be too sick to care. However, there may be situations in which you feel the need to keep up appearances. In those cases, propecia is for you. It is quite slow acting but its effects are reasonably reliable.