Milli Vanilli likes it long. Sinead O`Connor cuts it short. A lot of bald men wear it fake, but they probably would rather have their own.
The reference here is to hair, but that`s not what this discussion is about. It`s about a lack of it, a predicament men have spent considerable energy trying to reverse since the classical Greek period, at least.
Aristotle was bald and hated it.
So was Hippocrates. Hippocrates, being the father of medicine, tried to do something; he applied female sheep`s urine to his bald spot, giving us everlasting reassurance that even learned men can be morons when vanity supersedes logic.
Things degenerated from there. In an attempt to encourage follicles to germinate, some Romans plastered their heads with chicken dung, a treatment that not only failed to encourage hair but drastically reduced their dinner invitations.
Laugh if you want to, but understand that modern man is about as stupid as his Roman counterpart. It begins at medicine shows and continues on to the half-hour ”infomercials” on late-night TV; here, the product is always invented in Scandinavia or Italy or the Far East, someplace you can`t call up and check out. And that`s only if you want real hair.
If you`re willing to go for fake hair, you can buy everything from a relatively safe hair weave to a stick-on job, in which superglue is used to paste strands or a mat to your skull. One guy who had one of these lost part of it after two showers; the rest he lost in a hospital outpatient room, along with what was left of his real hair.
At the turn of the century, a hot mail-order item was the Evans Vacuum Cap, which essentially sucked your head like a vacuum cleaner. Allegedly, it stimulated the blood supply to the scalp to promote new-hair growth. A red scalp after 10 minutes of use was a sure sign that the machine was working, the sellers promised.
There`s no evidence that the Evans Vacuum Cap ever got anybody`s hair to grow, but it came with a money-back guarantee, which only about 5 percent of the customers took advantage of.
Plants, im- and trans-
The 1970s brought us hair implants, a takeoff on the only legitimate way, besides the drug Rogaine, known to restore hair so far: hair transplants. Hair transplants work because hair is redistributed from a place where it`s growing to a place where it`s not, and it`s your own hair. Hair implants employed artificial hair. A few doctors set up shops in New York and hired garment workers and wigmakers to do what might be considered microsurgery.
They would take a 12-inch strand of artificial hair, thread it through the scalp and knot it, repeating the process until their victim had as much
”hair” as was wanted. Eventually, the body would reject the fake hair as foreign matter, and if it wasn`t removed posthaste, infection would inevitably follow.
”Now you`re talking about a real problem,” says Gary Hitzig, a general surgeon who owns three hair-transplant clinics. ”It`s like a splinter: They put thousands of splinters in people`s scalps. Taking it out was not all that easy. The knots had entrenched themselves under the scalp. You had people losing their entire scalps.”
Eventually the Food and Drug Administration made hair implants a no-no, but not, says Hitzig, until at least two people had died.
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A couple of facts on how you go bald:
Each hair on your head grows for about five years; then it takes a rest. Three months later, the process starts over. Well, almost. The older you get, the longer your hair needs to rest. And when another shaft is produced, it`s thinner than the one it replaced. It`s a process of less and less.
By age 35, 60 percent of the male population is losing its hair-that`s 50 million Americans. The baldness gene can be passed down from your father or your mother, but it`s linked to the hormone that makes you a macho man, testosterone. That`s why few women go bald: They don`t have much testosterone. –
You might as well stare at Gary Hitzig`s head and get it over with. He once was bald and now he`s hirsute. Like Hippocrates, Hitzig is a doctor-he served a surgical residency at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York before he became a hair man. And, like Hippocrates, Hitzig did some peculiar things in order to have hair on his head.
Unlike Hippocrates, Hitzig, after years of pain and humiliation, got his hair, but if you`ll excuse a miserable pun, there were no shortcuts. ”I started losing my hair when I was 18 years old,” Hitzig says. ”Very genetic. My father was bald when he was 19, and my uncles were all bald by the time they were 20. There was nothing I could do.
”So I started going for these crazy cures. I was a medical student at the time, and I went to somebody who put a chemical on my head and scrubbed my head with it. That was supposed to neutralize the male hormones that were making me lose my hair.” Hitzig was required to scrape the gunk off his shower drain and take it to the guy for ”analysis.”
Since Hitzig was paying for the treatment from limited savings he`d earned mopping subways, the only thing he grew was poor.
Mail pattern baldness
Next, he bought a mail-order hair restorer that claimed to unclog the pores of a bald spot so hair could pop up. Since it takes hair about four months to start growing, Hitzig invested in the large economy size, a six-month supply for $250. No hair from that, either.
”I went through all these crazy treatments, and then I was tapped out financially,” Hitzig says. His brother-in-law, also a doctor, saw how distressed he was and offered to finance his hair transplant. Together, they tracked down what was supposed to be the best transplant practice in New York. And since he was on his way to being a doctor, Hitzig would get a professional discount.
This is the place you think Gary Hitzig`s problems disappear. Wrong. ”I went to two doctors in the city, and the transplant they did was terrible.”
He says they were so busy, ”they did me in a storage room. They told me to take my own bandage off and sent me on my way.”
The transplanted hair was installed at improper growing angles. Worse, Hitzig`s head scarred. Enough already. He went to the best wigmaker he could find and had a first-class rug made. His new girlfriend thought the hair was his, until one night the wind blew it off.
That was pretty much the way things stood as he worked his way through the residency at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. It was there Hitzig noticed that one of the surgeons, previously bald, had a hairline that was moving forward instead of backward. It was a transplant, and it looked good. The surgeon introduced Hitzig to the doctor who did the transplants.
Midcourse connection
”The method he described was totally different from what I went through,” Hitzig says. ”I started having it redone. The hair started growing in. The crazy thing is that the guy who started redoing me had a wife in Florida, and she threatened to divorce him if he didn`t move back to Florida. So he trained me to do the transplants, because he knew how crazy I was about the whole thing. He said, `Look, I`m leaving. Here`s the keys. It`s your practice.` ”
That was in 1976. Since then, Hitzig says, he has done 19,000 transplants in his two clinics in New York and one in Cherry Hill, N.J. And each year, an estimated 2 million men have the operation.
Although the transplant still is the most reliable way to get real hair, there is one other FDA-approved method-use of the drug Rogaine. (Though the latest news on Rogaine isn`t as encouraging as that of 10 years ago, when its ability to grow hair was being studied.)
The good news about Rogaine is that it does grow hair.
The bad news is its limitations. A prescription of Rogaine costs $60 a month, you have to rub it in twice a day and it takes a minimum of three or four months to see if it works. If it does, you have to apply it for the rest of your life. Researchers haven`t figured out why, but it won`t grow hair on the front of your head. In 39 percent of the men tested, it grew hair on the backs or crowns of their heads, but it works best on men who have been balding less than 10 years and whose bald spot is no bigger than 4 inches.
After years and years of discussion, the FDA finally got into hair control in January of this year, and it`s worthwhile to point out that Rogaine is the only approved method of growing hair. All the rest, the mail-order shysters and the TV shysters, were ordered to stop saying they could grow hair unless they could prove it. They couldn`t.
Most of them are shut down for the moment, but hair watchers say it`s probably only temporary. ”The next thing you`ll see,” says one observer,
”is that they`ll be advertising that their formula actually doesn`t grow hair. Your body grows hair-the formula just gives it a boost.”
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Hair trivia: Humans and lions are the only animals whose head hair grows until it`s cut or is broken off. Also, the lion seems to be the only animal besides man that suffers from male-pattern baldness.
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Attracting women is often considered to be the reason that men, from Hippocrates onward, have felt impelled to fill the empty spot on top of their heads. But maybe it has more to do with what goes on inside their heads, because studies show that a lot of women don`t give a damn whether a man is bald.
”America is a youth-oriented society,” Hitzig says. ”You don`t wear one green sock and one red sock when you get dressed. Why not? They both cover your ankles, they both keep you warm. You don`t because we`re an appearance-oriented society.”
There`s more to it than that, of course, but uncovering the most interesting part would require a couple of Freuds, 50 years and a government grant. For now, a story that Lou Amico tells is enlightening.
An 11-year boost
Amico has had one of Hitzig`s transplants. For Amico, the process began when he went nearly bald at 19. He was at a party one night, and a woman he was talking to guessed his age at 30. He didn`t want to be 30 at 19. He looked into hairpieces and weaves, but rejected them because he was a gymnast at West Chester (Pa.) University and he didn`t think he could keep either one from flapping while he was flipping.
”I`m getting a transplant,” he told his parents.
”Look,” they said, ”you look perfectly fine. We love you without hair.”
”Fine,” he said. ”I`m still getting a transplant.”
A year or so later, Lou Amico had a head of tight curls to flap when he flipped.
A year or so later, he was attending a wedding with his parents when he overheard his mother say, in a sort of confidential way: ”Doesn`t Lou look terrific since he had a hair transplant?” –
