I often have people who leave these types of fearful comments on my hair loss blog . People often email me things like: "I'm not sure if I can take this shedding for even one more day. At this rate, I'm worried that I will soon have very thin hair or look like I am balding. I can not afford to continue to lose hair at this rate. I'm afraid that this is never going to end and I'm going to be dealing with this for a long time to come."
I absolutely understand this because I experienced it myself. (There's more about that here .) In fact, I shed hair for more than a year before I actually got serious about trying to determine the cause and then fix it. This statement makes it sound as though I was not being proactive and did not care, but nothing is further from the truth. I did care and I went to many specialists. But, all of my tests and blood work was normal. I often heard things like "women can lose more hair as they age." Or "it's normal for your hair to thin as you get older." Or "telogen effluvium will often resolve itself on it's own."
All of these things may well be true, but this didn't help me at all. I was still shedding an alarming amount of hair each and every day and this was seriously affecting my self esteem and sense of well being. This gets very old very fast and you start to worry and become afraid that this shedding and hair loss is just never going to end.
It might comfort you to know that often your hair doesn't appear as bad to others as it does to you. I can remember confessing my hair loss to close friends and having them stare at me as though I was imagining it. I can also remember showing a close friend all of the shed hair in my dryer lint trap just so she would know that I wasn't making it all up. And the truth is, I'm certainly no expert but it's my understanding that true TE does resolve itself over time.
However, sometimes what we think is TE or telogen effluvium becomes chronic telogen effluvium or CTE. This means that the shedding has gone on for more than six months and has not yet resolved itself. There are many reasons that this can happen. Sometimes, the trigger that caused the shedding has not resolved. Sometimes, a new trigger has reared it's ugly head. And other times, the treatments that you are trying might have started a whole new round of shedding and hair loss.
Sometimes, you have to take a very methodical approach to your triggers to see if you can find somewhere that you haven't yet looked. After I did this, I had to open my mind to the possibilities that maybe I didn't have TE at all. Maybe I had AGA, AA, or some other form of hair loss. Unless you are shedding hair yourself, you probably don't understand why all these phrases and distinctions are important, but they are. Knowing what type of hair loss you have helps you to determine how best to treat it.
If you're feeling like your shedding is never going to end and it's been going on for longer than a few weeks or months, it never hurts to consider other causes or options rather than waiting around. And sometimes, even with TE, you can be proactive and can work on both the inflammation and the regrowth at the same time. You can learn more about this on my blog .
