Meds for Hair Loss? What Are You Eating?

The other day at the hair salon, I noticed the woman in the chair sitting next to me because she was strikingly beautiful.  She was mid-treatment of some sort so it was impossible to see what her hair looked like, but she appeared outwardly very healthy, slim and lovely with striking features. In such close quarters, it’s impossible not to hear the convo going on in the very next chair and I learned, as she chatted with her stylist, that she’d been taking some sort of meds to treat her hair loss. As the dialogue progressed, she mentioned she was taking, in her words, something her doctor recommended that was actually initially prescribed to many for ‘some other health issues’ but happened to also have the side effect of helping to address hair loss. The conversation continued and eventually segued into a tangent of some sort or another, illustrating how the fact that she was taking something her doc prescribed without even knowing what it was, was a non-issue. I was intrigued. I got home and searched a little online and found that “Spironolactone (Aldactone) is used to treat high blood pressure, and some women take it to stop hair loss. It can cause high levels of potassium to build up in the body, so it’s not the first thing a doctor would use for hair loss.” Hmmm.. was this what she was taking? I kept reading: “If a woman takes it and gets pregnant, it can cause birth defects in male children. The risk is so high that women of childbearing age aren’t even supposed to touch the drug. But some doctors do prescribe it to women when minoxidil doesn’t work or when they are past menopause.” Oh. My. I couldn’t stop thinking about that woman.  What was she eating?  Why was her hair falling out?  I wondered if she’d had her thyroid checked.   Was the fact that she was young and pretty making her think that everything on the inside was fine and the hair loss was just some annoying thing that was most easily dealt with by popping a pill or applying a cream? And sadly, this is the norm, and the anomaly is looking first at what we eat, addressing that and monitoring how it changes. Whatever may be going on with your body, tune in and look at what you’re consuming. Certainly, there are many factors that contribute to how one feels, but how we nourish, or pollute, ourselves must be the absolute first thing we look into. So much of how we feel and how we look and how we function is so based upon what we’re doing to support ourselves from a nutrition standpoint, so why not make this step one no matter what is going on?