Michael Finley
"Dealing with Hair Loss"
Reprinted from his "What Ails You?" columns for Twin Cities Business Monthly
© 2003 by Michael Finley
I
was having coffee with a couple of fiftysomething buds, and the subject of
hair came up. Both friends are high of forehead, and shook their heads
ruefully. I rolled my eyes upward to my own measly gray frond and said,
“I know what you mean.”
The
look they gave me was homicidal. In their view, I had no idea what they
meant, and clearly they would, in a Lord of the Flies type
situation, do away with me and dispose of my carcass for that sad patch of
fleece.
Isn’t that too bad? Male pattern baldness is clearly the way of both nature and the future. Approximately 30 million men in the US experience it. By age 35 about 40% of all men show some degree of hair loss.
It’s
not a physiological pathology, even if it does go by the name androgenic
alopecia. If anything, baldness is associated with rampant
testosterone. “Snow on the roof, but fire in the belly,” the saying
goes. It hasn’t set Sean Connery back much. Could we not celebrate what
a bare head connotes about wisdom and experience, and forget the sunlight
glinting off it?
Evidently we can’t. Thomas Cash of Old Dominion University in Virginia, perhaps the world’s foremost hair psychologist, says hair’s psychic importance can’t be overemphasized.
“From monks to skinheads, prisoners of war to warriors, ‘bigwig’ European aristocrats to moptop Beatles, and hippies to head-shaven celebrity athletes, hair makes a statement, whether chosen or imposed,” he says. Hair connotes status, and therefore one’s prospects for mating and thus the survival of one’s treasured DNA.
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