Hope For Hair Raising - And Razing
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday June 16, 1997
Losing your hair or growing too much?
Dermatologists claim to have developed a drug-free, non-surgical treatment for hair loss.
And for the hirsute they have developed a permanent hair removal technique using lasers instead of electrolysis.
The techniques will be revealed today to more than 5,000 specialists here for the 19th World Congress of Dermatology at Darling Harbour.
The new treatments for hair growth and removal were discovered by mistake.
The hair-loss treatment, electro-tricho-genesis (ETG), was discovered when patients being treated for migraine with electronic acupuncture noticed a reduction in hair loss.
Professor Stuart Madden, of Canada's University of British Columbia, then carried out clinical trials in which balding men wore hoods and used using ETG for 12 minutes once a week for 32 weeks.
The treatment, to cost $1,260 in Australian clinics, stopped hair loss and regenerated hair when the follicles were still alive.
It is only one of two medical hair-loss treatments approved by the Federal Government's Therapeutic Goods Administration Authority.
The permanent hairremoval technique was also discovered by mistake when Welsh Professor Marc Clement was using a laser to treat a birthmark and accidentally trained the beam on his arm.
"The hairs vapourised and didn't grow back," he said.
A laser created specifically to remove hair from the face, neck, back, buttocks and chest was then tested on more than 800 men and women at Denmark's University Hospital of Aarhus, with 85 per cent success.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
