Hashimoto’s Disease and Female Hair Loss

my daughter was diagnosed with Hashimotos in 1998. she has been suffering hair loss since then and it is now quite serious. She went to a dermatologist who told her that her hair loss was genetic and unrelated to the Hashimotos. That is hard for me to believe. She is very resistant to getting further help so I don’t know what to do to do and where to send her. She is at Stanford and there is a Dermatology Clinic with a specialty in hair loss but I keep thinking the problem is the autoimmune disease. Can you give me some advise about what to do.

While having a diagnosis certainly helps with finding a treatment, for women’s hair loss there is no definitive treatment. If you treat the thyroid disease the thinning may slow down, but it is unlikely that after treatment the loss will reverse. I have never seen it revert back to the original fullness. Even for genetic women’s hair loss (just like men’s genetic hair loss) there is no cure. If the hair loss issue is from an autoimmune disease, there is really no cure either and many doctors are suggesting that genetic hair loss may actually be an autoimmune process, not uniquely genetic alone.

At best, you can treat the Hashimoto’s disease and the hair loss may slow down. I am sorry for the bluntness, but at this time there is no medical cure for genetic hair loss in men or women… and unfortunately, we seem to know far less about treating female hair loss than we do with male hair loss.