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Examining Hair Loss in Women

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Female Alopecia

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Abstract

As with any medical problem, the female patient complaining of hair loss requires a comprehensive medical and drug history, physical examination of the hair and scalp, and appropriate laboratory evaluation to identify the cause. The clinician also has a host of diagnostic techniques that enable classification of the patient’s disorder as a shedding disorder or a decreased density disease and documentation of true pathology or only perceived pathology.

The first, never to accept anything for true which I do not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what is presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as ­possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.

The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.

And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Dermatology and Hair Diseases, Wallisellen, Switzerland

    Ralph M. Trüeb

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  1. Ralph M. Trüeb
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Trüeb, R.M. (2013). Examining Hair Loss in Women. In: Female Alopecia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35503-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35503-5_2

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