CROWNING GLORY

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, A LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY IN MANILA BULLETIN, 13 JUNE 2008)

Good news to all the dads out there, as well as to men in general!

Personally, I thought that baldness was something life throws at you, some kind of a genetic lottery. Even worse, I had the notion that it was a natural consequence of aging. As his father before him, my father had receding hairline, but he died at 49 and didn’t live to see how far it would go as he aged.

BLURB
Only 216,000 Filipino men with Male Pattern Hair Loss out of a massive 5.4 million sought treatment options, with ultimately 21,000 receiving medical treatment. —AC Nielsen Factbook 2003

I have never really entertained the thought of going bald, but every time it crossed my mind, I would simply shrug it off, resigned to the fact—or what I thought was a fact—that there was nothing I could do about it, except resorting to a comb-over (which I swore I’d never ever do) or to hair implants (which I find obvious and ghastly on most men I know).

A dermatologist once told me that aging was a disease and therefore it had a cure. It sounds like a commercial for anti-aging medicine, but it’s proving to be quite true. Last week, at lunch with one of only two international board-certified medical experts specializing in dermatopathology in the Philippines, Dr. Adolfo Bormate, at the Mandarin Oriental Manila, I have stumbled upon the fact (a fact this time) that there is also a pill for hair loss or what Dr. Bormate and the people behind ProHair, a program being advocated by Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) Philippines to provide professional attention to hair loss, as “Male Pattern Hair Loss” (MPHL). I won’t go into the details of the program, but suffice it to say that if you are afflicted with MPHL or are worried about eventually having it, the advocacy program has recently created www.prohair.com.ph to help you through the problem. Check it out! It’s literally like Facebook, except that instead of plain networking and throwing red gummy bears at each other every now and then, on the ProHair website, you’re dealing with a problem—yours, your father’s, your brother’s, your husband’s, your boyfriend’s, or your son’s—that burdens some 5.4 million Filipinos, who are fighting “a silent battle with stress, confidence, and self-esteem.” According to a study in 2007, 50 percent of all Filipino males or two out of three will suffer from MPHL in their lifetime.

It’s not funny, although some of us might think that the worst that can happen when your forehead starts to extend toward the nape of your neck is that you will be the butt of all jokes. In a study at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia by Thomas Cash, there is “great distress associated with poor body image in men with MPHL,” who have been found to have “copious coping efforts to adjust to, compensate for, or conceal hair loss.”

Thus, the need to recognize MPHL for what it is, which was the point of our lunch and the point of ProHair. Aside from information, along with all the possible treatments, the website has a long list of specialists you can run to for professional help. Moreover, you can reach out to other MPHL “sufferers” to seek or provide support or simply exchange experiences and information. Best of all, there’s a “Doctor’s Station” where medical experts can share professional opinion and advice. Whether or not you are having anxiety attacks over real, anticipated, or imagined MPHL, prohair.com.ph is worth a visit. There’s cause to worry: MPHL is a progressive condition that, if not properly diagnosed or if left untreated, sheds at least five percent of hair each year.

But what caught my attention over lunch with Dr. Bormate, clinical associate professor at the UP-PGH Medical Center, international fellow at the American Academy of Dermatology, and non-resident associate at the American Society of Dermatopathology, is the drug Finasteride. Showing before and after photographs of many of his patients, he said it had been proven to work, although, according to some studies, some two percent of cases under this treatment suffer such side effects as decreased libido and volume of ejaculation, as well as erectile dysfunction. After all, the main culprit of MPHL is also the one responsible for the development of male organs. What a bitter pill, indeed! But Dr. Bormate was quick to say that all it takes is to stop the medication to get rid of its side effects, except that you also lose all the hair you have gained back along with them.

But are we just splitting hairs here? Finasteride is not an over-the-counter drug, which only means that you can choose to assure yourself of professional supervision while you are taking it, so all you have to do is to pray you do not belong to the poor two percent who have to sacrifice sex for vanity or that, if you do belong to this small fraction, vanity does turn out to be your favorite sin.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com