Alopecia Universalis

 This little girl (age 9) came to us, along with her twin, who had the same diagnosis, in February of 2014.  The hair in their entire bodies (including facial hair, leg hair and eyebrows in addition to their scalp) had fallen out entirely, at age 3 1/2.  They had been to numerous endocrinologists, dermatologists and family practitioners.  They were prescribed thyroid hormone (at age 6!) and had therapies directed toward the scalp, including steroids and laser therapy — all to no avail.

This case history is an excellent example of why the Ancient Doctors always said get to the hetu, or underlying problem, before determining how to fix any health problem.  It was true that their thyroid glands were weak, and it is quite common for the hair to fall out when the thyroid is weak like this.

But this wasn’t the underlying problem.  It was just a symptom.

So when I saw them, I had them discontinue their thyroid hormones.  Instead, our approach was to fix the REASON why the thyroid was weak, take away that problem, and allow the thyroid to heal, giving it every opportunity to make its own hormones again.

Here is what I found:  The thyroid was being attacked by the immune system.  As we’ve talked about in previous case histories, there is too much pharmaceutical intervention during the early childhood years — with 70 shots, flu shots every year, recurring rounds of antibiotics — so that the foundation of the immune system, the friendly bacteria in the gut, are killed with each round of new shots or each new antibiotic.  The friendly bacteria are the foundation for the rest of the immune system — so when they die off, the immune system starts spiraling out of control, and quickly loses its intelligence, going into the attack mode, and starts attacking the body.  In this case, the immune system was attacking the girls’ thyroid gland.

Another part of their hetu was that the girls were given soy formulas as babies.  It is a well-known fact that the isoflavones in soy depress the thyroid gland function.

So, once we regrew their friendly bacteria and a few other parts of the gut’s normal physiology, directed gentle support to the thyroid gland to help heal it, changed their diets, and gave them our beautiful scalp oils to 1) nourish the hair follicles and 2) regrow the hair follicles, the hair started growing back almost immediately!

I took their pictures every time they came in for their 2-month check-up — and they just continued to show steady progress, until this last visit, last week, which marks our one year anniversary of working together — as you can see the hair is fully grown back now!

I am very appreciative of Vaidya Mishra’s family lineage, and Vaidya Mishra himself, for their work in the field of dermatology and hair loss in particular.  Vaidya sat with me for 15 years, seeing these types of imbalances that are so prevalent in this modern day and age, and created hundreds of new formulas for everything he saw.  The ancient doctors left the chapters of Ayurveda open for any new practitioner to come along and cognize what was needed for these very types of things they couldn’t foresee.  

Vaidya Mishra is writing the new chapters of Ayurveda, to make it easy for us practitioners out in the field, to help our patients overcome these types of imbalances that the ancient doctors couldn’t have predicted would arise.  Thank you again Vaidya, for making our work not only

easy, but highly effective.

Dr. Marianne Teitelbaum

Cinnaminson, New Jersey 856-786-3176