In my own personal experience, most women's hair loss starts as telogen effluvium or TE. This very fancy medical term means shedding. It most commonly happens after giving birth, going off of birth control pills, having surgery, trying crash diets or experiencing severe stress or illness. People who are in the middle of TE know it because hair is typically everywhere. There will be more hair on your clothing, on the floor, in the shower drain and in your brush. It's very hard to ignore. Technically in medical terms, you're experiencing it if you are shedding more than 100 hairs per day on a consistent basis.
If that's not troublesome enough, there's no hard and fast rules as to how long telogen effluvium will last. Most doctors will tell you that it should cease on its own within a few months. If it doesn't, the condition is then called chronic or CTE. This chronic condition has been known to last for months or years. Unfortunately, it's often impossible to both pinpoint the cause and fix it.
Most experts will tell you that the most common reason women shed is a change in hormones. Yet, many hair loss products contain herbs or ingredients that alter hormones. Women who take these products then risk worsening or lengthening the TE.
I've had personal experience with this and have also seen it written about in many hair loss forums. Generally, if your system is sensitive enough that it was thrown into TE when your body experienced a change, then it makes a lot of sense to be very careful about making additional changes when considering treatment.
From my experience, it's best to try the most conservative treatments first and to try them one at time. This way, you will know what is causing any changes in your hair loss since you are only using one thing at a time. And, if you start with very conservative treatments, you can always add on if you need to. However, if you go all out with treatments that alter hormones, it's much harder to control or stop worsening hair loss.
That's why I always recommend shampoos and topicals as a first means of treatment and I recommend introducing them one at a time. You should only introduce a second product when you've had at least three weeks with no troublesome side effects from the first. And if the first product is working, give it time to work before introducing something else.
How do I know all of this? Because I lived it. In my quest to end my hair loss, I looked at my triggers, my iron, my thyroid, my adrenals, my hormones, and my scalp. It was a long, hard, frustrating journey which all but wrecked my self esteem. But, I never gave up and I finally found something that helped quite a bit. You can read a very personal story at / .
