A good hair day – Glass talks to Dr Sharon Wong about work as a leading dermatotrichologist and her groundbreaking project Get Ahead of Hair Loss
It is rather interesting to me that the most searched for article on the Glass website is not a celebrity or fashion story, but rather a feature about how to deal with hair thinning. Anxiety about hair – thinning or loss – flies somewhat under the conventional beauty radar but it is clearly of deep concern to many, including Dr Sharon Wong. After a career as a consultant running her own dermatology clinic in an east London hospital, Derbyshire-born Wong became fascinated by the science of the hair follicle, which has led her to specialising as a trichologist and establishing the Get Ahead of Hair Loss (GAoHL) project, which Glass discussed with her.
The hair follicle is “a mini organ; there’s no other real structure in your body that continuously renews itself throughout your life. So, every time you shed a hair it’s replaced with a new one and that’s because your hair follicle keeps regenerating over your entire lifespan,” Dr Wong tells me. “So as a source of stem cells, it’s very interesting. But then you’ve got the other aspect, the very cosmetic side of hair, which is inescapable really. But also, what it means to a person to lose their hair is also hugely varied. So, while it wouldn’t bother one person at all to lose all their hair, having a little bit of shedding is the end of the world for another person, and it’s quite interesting to see the spectrum.”
Dr Sharon Wong
“So, I’ve loved the subject, and when I started seeing patients with hair loss, I liked the fact it was quite a contained subject but had the whole spectrum from being very scientific right through to the cosmetic world.”
Dr Wong became a consultant in 2012 at Homerton Hospital, north-east London, and she spoke to the managers about her specific clinical interest in hair loss, and they enabled her to start a service. There were very few NHS hair loss clinics in the country, so the service was definitely very much in demand, and as soon as local GPs knew that it existed, it filled up very quickly.
So, put simply, what is a trichologist, I ask her? “A trichologist is a professional who has studied hair and scalp, (sometimes these courses are two or three years long),” she explains to me but as Dr Wong emphasises this does not mean all trichologists have studied it at a medical degree level (unlike her).
“They are not medics, they are not doctors,” she stresses. However, often their entire study is focusing on hair and scalp problems. “So the difficulty we are having with the public’s understanding is the definitions are all slightly blurred and so are the roles of different professionals. A trichologist just means they are a hair expert, it doesn’t define what their background degree is. If patients have a more severe form of hair loss that needs a prescription or medication, the trichologist, unlike a doctor, would not be able to offer that.
“Certainly, some of the trichologists are very experienced and can give you a diagnosis early, and sometimes better than GPs can do. But if you needed testing, blood tests, or to investigate things, or if you needed some simple treatments or prescriptions you would need to go to your doctor or dermatologist.”
The GAoHL logo
Running her clinic, Dr Wong realised that there was much misinformation and confusion around hair and hair loss which worryingly can lead to poor outcomes (and also financial exploitation), which led her to setting up GAoHL project in 2018 to streamline reliable information and get it all in one place.
“GAoHL was born because I was really becoming frustrated with patients having misinformation or having the wrong diagnosis,” she explains to me. There is also the economic aspect as many people waste “so much time and so much money in wrong places, and still not yet had a diagnosis for their hair loss. And the difficulty is that – just like the cosmetic industry – the hair industry is also not very regulated. And when there are lots of products out in the market and it’s down to the responsibility of the company themselves to market ethically, that doesn’t always happen. There are lots of false promises and targeting a group of patients that are really quite vulnerable. So from that frustration of hearing patient narratives, there had to be some way of educating the public about hair loss; the different types of hair loss; the common ones; what are the general kinds of solutions; who are the people they should be consulting if they notice there is a problem with their hair? We ran that last year, and it was very well attended by patients and hairdressers, which was an unexpected group of people.”
The event is all about “a multidisciplinary approach, so the best way of managing someone with hair loss is to look at it much more holistically. There is a medical aspect to it, but also, don’t forget that there are often things that other professionals can offer: hairdressers, in the way they cut and dye the hair, wig providers, people who do scalp tattooing, and psychologists as well. GAoHL is about getting all these professionals together.”
The September conference featured speakers ranging from specialist doctors in the field of hair loss; hairdressers (often the first people to notice hair and scalp problems and a great source of knowledge); panels on male hair loss; the care and condition of Afro-Caribbean hair, and the psychology of hair loss. It was a fascinating and highly informative (and also well-organised) event for both experts in the field and also interested laypeople such as myself and a must-attend for anyone interested in the fascinating world of the follicle.
by Caroline Simpson
A Get Ahead of Hair Loss conference is planned for this year