In a recent comment on the blog, a reader brought up a term I wasn’t familiar with — cyberchondria — which is when a person will escalate their concerns about symptoms based on what they’ve read online. It seems like half the questions this blog gets are from cyberchondriacs, or rather, people who tend to play armchair doctor or fantasy biochemist when it comes to medicine and disease.

Have you noticed an increase in know-it-alls coming into your practice in recent years? It’s always good to educate yourself, but are we starting to get to a point where a doctor is just someone we need to see in order to get a prescription for something that we’ve already diagnosed ourselves with?

That is a good point. “Cyberchondria” is not only limited to BaldingBlog. With the rise of the Internet, doctors battle with patients that diagnose themselves on a day to day basis. Of course it is good to educate yourself, but I would think hypochondriacs and/or cyberchondriacs make for a formidable nightmare for a lot of doctors.

Snippet from the article:

Sometime in his late 30s, after his hair had been thinning for several years, Dr. Albert Mannes decided to shave what was left of his mane. He then noticed a curious thing: “Strangers were more standoffish, more deferential,” he recalls.

“I found that people treated me differently once I started shaving my head, which made me wonder whether my experience was unique,” says Mannes.

This led Mannes, a lecturer at the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania, to design three experiments that tested other people’s perception of men with shaved heads. His findings appear in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

All three studies found similar results: A man’s shorn scalp was linked with dominance. In other words, men with shaved heads were perceived as powerful by others.

Read the rest — Guys with shaved heads seem tougher, study says

These are interesting studies about how society sees completely bald men with shaved heads.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article —

Protection against skin cancer can be added to the list of health benefits that come with drinking coffee, a new study says.

Women who drank more than three cups of coffee daily were 21 percent less likely to develop basal cell carcinoma (BCC), compared with women who drank less than one cup of caffeinated coffee per month, the study showed. For men, this risk reduction was 10 percent.

“Most likely, the protective effect is due to caffeine,” said lead author Jiali Han, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. People in the study who drank decaffeinated coffee did not appear to have a lower risk of developing the skin cancer.

Read the rest at Scientific Amerian – Coffee May Help Protect against Skin Cancer

Caffeine intake is possibly linked to skin cancer prevention. Interesting stuff.

We’re taking a day off to celebrate Independence Day. We hope everyone has a happy and safe July 4th!

Happy birthday, USA! We’ll be back here tomorrow.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

The human body is largely not human. It contains trillions of microbes that outnumber our own cells 10 to 1, affecting our health and behavior. Now, an international consortium of around 200 scientists has mapped this diverse microbial community at an unprecedented level of detail, and shown just how much it varies from person to person.

Read the rest in The Scientist — Microbial Menagerie

We (the scientific community) are accumulating massive amounts of data on what grows in our mouths and our gut, and learning that our guts contain a microbial menagerie of organisms that are different in each of us. They change within our guts often as mutations create variations in these bacteria. In disease, they are different than in normal people. We know that people with Chron’s disease and colitis have developed an “unhealthy” relationship with their gut bacteria.

We are also starting to believe that our gut bacteria may be useful in the diagnosis of impending problems in our health. Our bacteria carry out overlapping jobs, including creating and breaking down nutrients for us, and the population, even in newborns, may dictate the baby’s health. Babies show that microbiotic diversity changes very rapidly in the few days after birth, and the acquisition of unculturable bacteria expanded rapidly after the third day and probably contribute to the development of the baby’s immune system.

Some people proclaim that we are what we eat, but maybe we are what we grow and nurture inside our mouth and our gut, as much as what we eat.

As an innovator in the field and with many patents to your name I am curious as to whether you have ever given thought to inventing a “scalp exercise” device. Imagine a motorized device strapped around one’s head moving the scalp up and down to increase one’s laxity in preparation for a future transplant. It would basically work as a scalp massage.

For a couple hundred dollars I’m sure many transplant patients would invest in one to maximize their graft numbers. Doing these exercises with the hands can get quite exhausting just after a few minutes.

It’s a good idea, but there have been a few patients who have came up with their own scalp exercise ideas that they are pursuing. In the grand scheme of things, scalp exercises are not the rate limiting step, nor do the exercises have a drastic impact on the success or planning of a hair transplant procedure in most situations.

Believe it or not, if I were to create a device for scalp massages and claimed it could loosen the scalp, it would be a medical device from the FDA’s perspective. It would then have to be proven safe and effective, a tall and expensive undertaking I might say.