shedding hair fast

[brunobald]

I went to a tricologist a few weeks back. She performed an indepth examination of my hair took about an hour and a half. I was expecting her to confirm MPB but she said the majourity of my hair loss was a combo of stress and poor diet.

She attributed 15 to 20% of my hair loss down to MPB and I was not to consider taking any dht blocker as my case was very mild? She had prescribed finastieride to over 500 men with only one reporting sides. Intrestingly there were also a few on RU who were doing well on it.

Here is a little info on how the diagnosis was done.

1. Check scalp with video microscope, mild dandruff and no infections.
2. Perform hair pull test
3. Pull out two groups of about 20 hairs from two different sites on the scalp. This hair was viewed under a microscope with a video display and a polarizing light. Viewing the hair shaft under polarized light shows up the minerals and hair condtion. Healthy hair looks transparent with a colour palette similer to tortiouse shell, unhealthy hair is black and the light does not shine through. I had a lot of black hair. Next she looked at the roots/bulbs of the hair and this is where I get confused. Apparently larger hair bulbs are an indication of MPB I though the complete opposite was true becasue of the follicular miniturisation? Also the hair without bulbs im guessing these are the growing angen hairs looked like they had been pinched at the end and this was an indication of stress and low water intake?

Another intresting point she raised was even though the majourity of hair was lost on the MPB areas this does not necessarily mean it was lost via MPB as in men the MPB area will typically have less blood flow and therefore get hit the hardest.

So hard to know what to belive, there are so few documented cases of Male TE espically in the MPB yet the tricologist arguements made sense and if she belived it was MPB why did she not say so. Was she looking to string me along and hopefully book some more appointents to sell me some "product" along the way. I guess over her career she must have seen 1000's of MPB case under the microscope and like anything you do that many times you must gain a kind of instinct for these things.

Anyway I don't know what im trying to prove other than convice myself its not MPB which I know in the back of my mind it is. But I though I would let you know a little insight into the tricology methods as there is not a lot on the forum about these methods with the microscope and polarized light.