Institute For Hair

I’m Dr. Cheryl Burgess, board-certified dermatologist in Washington, DC. I am the co-founder and owner of Center for Dermatology and Dermatologic Surgery. I’m going to talk about PRP. There’s a lot of interest in platelet rich plasma, and what does that mean? That is a procedure that has been used for many, many years in other specialties of medicine, but in dermatology we find that people are inquiring about this PRP technique for hair growth. It is used to stimulate hair growth in male and female pattern baldness and other types of alopecias.

This is a technique in where the patient comes to the office, the blood is drawn, the blood is then spun down so that we can harvest the growth factors and stem cells of the patient and then we re-inject those stem cells and growth factors into the scalp, or the area of where the the hair growth is needed. And so this is a technique, it’s not a new technique, but it’s gotten a lot of press by a lot of people doing it. I advise people who have issues of hair loss to consult with a dermatologist who specializes in hair loss.

Although all dermatologists get hair loss and hair growth issues and training in their residency, not all pursue that in their private practice or once they get out of residency. It’s really important that people understand the growth patterns and the cycles of hair growth in order to really evaluate if they’re responding to the PRP. In my office you should see a result or some hair growth within one month. We do see that with our patients, if it’s done correctly. If you’re interested, I would contact the Center for Dermatology and Dermatologic Surgery and call for an appointment.

When patients come to see me for hair loss, what I try to explain to them is there are a multitude of reasons why people lose their hair. It’s not always female pattern hair loss. I think that’s what scares most women when they start shedding.

But there’s a number of reasons and there are a number of causes. But the thing is that most of these come about three months prior to the person coming into the dermatologist’s office. So that’s one thing I do want to specifically point out.

People think it was something they did the weekend before or because they just got their hair colored or chemically processed; that’s what’s happening. So when we look at hair loss, we look at, are you losing it from the root? Or is it breaking? Are there fractured hairs? and then we determine which one it is and go from there.

If it is a hair loss situation, we try to determine whether it is a scarring type of hair loss or a non-scarring type of hair loss situation. So when patients come in and say I have alopecia or I was told I had alopecia, well, alopecia just means hair loss. So it’s very important to get a diagnosis of what type of alopecia that you have.

Therefore to do that, the dermatologist comes in. Sometimes it requires blood work and sometimes it requires a scalp biopsy to determine what’s going on at the follicular or root level. Occasionally we will see infections of the scalp, like a fungus infection or a folliculitis or bacterial infection that’s causing you to shed your hair.

So it’s very, very important to consult with the dermatologist when you have hair loss and we can take it from there and do a workup. I know in my baseline workup, I am looking at hormones and looking at your thyroid. I’m also examining the hair under the microscope to see am I dealing with just breakage because you wear your hair bleach blonde and that really strips the Keratin or strips the protein of the hair.

Unfortunately, dermatologists are trained in skin, hair and nails, but they’re not a lot around who’s specifically trained and do further training and specialized in hair loss. So even with dermatologists, you do want to choose someone who is accustomed to dealing with that on a daily basis.