The Hair Loss Experience

I suffered from severe dandruff problems as a teenager (ladies). I combatted this with a ferocious grooming program that saw me going at my hair with a comb whenever my hands were free. It was about as much fun as it sounds, but I was making progress. When hair would fall out during these combing sessions I saw it as a good sign: I was clearing my scalp of rubbish and so on.

It took a while to realise that I was prematurely balding. My hairline is currently about two inches higher than it used to be in 2008.

While it was never anything to write home about, I did have a decent head of hair that grew quite thick. Inexorably losing this at a difficult age was a strange experience. If you're a teenager you probably understand what I'm talking about. Actually, you probably don't. Teenagers don't actually understand anything. Really.

I didn't understand my hair loss either. I grew anxious and well-meaning family members suggested a wealth of remedies ranging from strange oils to the application of onion juice. I tried these at times, depending on my mood, with no results. I'd already been keeping my hair pretty short since childhood, and this was the start of a program of basically shaving down to the scalp. My parents felt that if there was no hair at all, it could hardly fall off. There are issues with this logic but if they aren't readily apparent to you, then they aren't worth the bother of making explicit. 

When I was nearing 22, we went to see a medical professional. A dermatologist at a very successful foreign hospital that I cannot name for legal reasons, but you know what I mean. This gentleman diagnosed me with alopecia. He attributed this to my habit of staying up very late, though the problem had started at an age when I went to bed at midnight. He also prescribed expensive medication that I duly tried for about six months. (He also told me that a skin complaint I've had since childhood is the disease keratosis pilaris, and any children I have will inherit it – so all in all it was a nice day out.)

The medication was mostly alright. A few things to ingest and a cool liquid to rub onto my scalp regularly. It halted the hairfall, but the dermatologist kept insisting that it would actually regrow the lost hair. In our biweekly follow-up appointments he'd look at my bald patch and claim to see little hairs sprouting. Eventually we got him to agree that all we were doing was spending money to keep a problem at bay, not solving it.

He proposed a radically new method that had reportedly brought life to the barren gardens of many men's bare heads. This involved taking my blood, isolating the plasma, mixing it with a medicine bought from the hospital's pharmacy, and then working it into my scalp using something like a blunt drill. So that went on for a few months until I managed to convince my parents that maybe their son going bald wasn't the worst thing ever.

I've since read that unusual levels of testosterone can cause early baldness in a man. The sources treated this as the sort of information to suggestively wink about. To me this feels like consolation prize stuff and a little bit of objectification. I can accept realities but for my old hairline I'd happily trade away these supposed extra hormones. The normal amount of testosterone is more than enough for any man, if he uses it wisely.

If you're a balding person, be careful about the treatments you're going to try. A bit of that old hair probably isn't worth the trouble, money and discomfort.

Zoheb Mashiur is a prematurely balding man with bad facial hair and so does his best to avoid people. Ruin his efforts by writing to zoheb.mashiur@gmail.com