As part of our Wellness Wednesday theme, in this article, Dr. Sunyatta Amen, a fifth-generation master herbalist, naturopathic doctor, vegan chef, witch, and the entrepreneur behind Calabash Tea & Tonic, explains the causes of alopecia and recommends a few hair-saving treatments.
Alopecia is hair loss. It has been commonly held that high levels of stress exacerbate this condition with regard to hair loss. And many of us know or have observed that when we’re under tremendous levels of stress, we may have shedding in our hair; we comb it through, and you have a huge ball of hair and you’re like, well, what is going on?
Shouldn’t have too much fear. If you can reduce the stress, the hair will come back, right? Nine out of 10 [times], it starts to repopulate. And so we talked about this last week with regard to sexual function and secondary sex characteristics. If your body doesn’t have enough resources, it won’t allocate anything to that. It’s saying, ‘Man, I’m under stress. I need these minerals, I need this copper, I need this zinc, I need these things. I don’t need hair. I need to survive.’
So you will only get what you need to survive. And so, in this case, the stress can cause the body not to send resources to those areas. Now, there is a doctor. I really like his work as alopecia and he started to grow his hair back recently he is on YouTube, and it’s Gary Linkov, and he talks about hair loss. Now, keep in mind he does a lot of videos about plastic surgery. I don’t want to say plastic, but cosmetic surgery and taking an estimate of what cosmetic surgery someone has had and how it has changed their face. And also what he does as a surgeon, I would not do because [it is sometimea] something that’s either dangerous or can produce a weird result. So keep in mind a lot of that stuff’s on his channel.
If you’re not into it, don’t watch it. But I have to say it’s my guilty pleasure also because a lot of the things he’s talking about with regard to c craniofacial surgeries are things that I experienced having clients come to me, having people ask me about things they may have already had. Something that is not cosmetic per se, but functional as well, where they may have had a deviated septum or something that needed correction, they may have had their ears pinned back, they may have had other kinds of issues. He is really good at talking about that stuff. And I really love his knowledge base. He’s one of those dudes who won’t just go in and do surgeries on people.
I love that he’s ethical.
And so he talks about alopecia and you’ll see in a lot of his videos. He’s super balded and even didn’t have eyebrows for a while. And then he said he reduced his level of stress, level of patience, and other kinds of stuff that was pulling on him, and it started to grow back. And you’ll see the more current videos say that. And he did one maybe a couple of weeks ago. His eyebrows have come back in and his hair has started to come back in. So go and check him out and tell him I sent you. He’s a great guy. He knows a lot.
One more thing. If you’re taking biotin, I love it. There’s a company called Sports Research and we used to carry it on our site, but my staff was like, ‘We have too many things to send out to people’ — but I take it every day.
I took it this morning. I typically take four of those capsules and they’re done in coconut oil, four to five of them a day. People like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know if I saw that much result.’ I only took one. Get yourself together. I usually take five of those a day. I see a difference in my skin. I see a difference in my hair. And also take MSM. Great, great, great. [It’s] the silica that I recommended. So every time we talk about hair, skin, nails, we’re going to talk about these same things over and over again.
Get it in your life, get in your cabinet, get it in your body. And then there is a supplement, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this one before. It’s called Viviscal and it’s made from a plankton protein. I have found that people who have hair loss have gotten a great result with that. Thinning hair, balding areas, men and women. Because sometimes, as we age or we’re under tremendous amounts of stress, we may have areas that are a little thinner and that includes on the edges. Well, most of us have four different grades of hair on our head. Typically the crown of your head may be much curlier than the rest of your hair, like tighter and curlier. The edges may be thinner; we just have different patterns of hair. It is not unusual — four or five different things can be going on on one head. You can have 3C, 3A, 4B as the types of hair happen. So sometimes that hair loss is happening to one type of hair. What’s interesting is that the curlier parts of the hair typically are not the ones that come out. Those are the more anchored parts of the hair. thing that I’ve added today is the Viviscal. I think it’s awesome. I’ve seen great results from it for people. One tablet in the morning after breakfast and one in the evening. And I’ve seen people have a great result. You have to take it as it comes to you and how you feel about it and start slow, go low is my thing. See how you feel and make sure that if you have allergies to anything that is an ingredient, stay vigilant on that. Also, if you have thyroid issues that you’re supposed to or not supposed to take certain things, just ask your physician first.
But that stress baby, we got to get it down to the ground! That’s why I like the chill out tonic. I like the My Last Good Nerve. It keeps me from Murder She Wrote. I am prone to murder. So I will tell you that getting your stress level down, it makes a huge difference. You comb through your hair or you finish your shower; you’re not going to have so much of it and be worried about it, which causes more hair loss, right?
