How exactly did this come about?
Victory was secured for the pharmaceutical companies because they claimed that polysorbate was being marketed as a hair-restoring drug without FDA approval. FDA approval was not granted because, of course, no clinical trials had taken place. It is not the FDA’s role to carry out such trials, nor is it the court’s role to determine whether such trials should actually take place. The only body that could have conducted such trials would be the pharmaceutical companies of course; the very people that not only declined to carry out any such trials in the first place but also initiated legal action in the second.
What you need to understand is that the absence of this material from the market place benefited no-one except the pharmaceutical companies because, in common with all natural cures and practices, it competed with their commercial products. In other words, it damaged their sales targets, their profit margins and their share price. Now, if you extrapolate the position with polysorbate to cover all such therapies, you will begin to grasp the scale of the deception.
You have been forewarned and are thus also now forearmed.
Chapter Two
First Impressions
We are all biologically primed to choose mates that are mature, healthy and likely to live as long as it takes to help raise any offspring through at least the first stages of infanthood. This last fact is important amongst humans because children are born relatively helpless compared to other animals. Foals walk and suckle within minutes of their birth, for instance, whereas human infants can do no such thing.
As a rule judgements based on other criteria, however, are not a peculiarly human or even mammalian trait. Any species that uses sexual reproduction (as opposed to asexual, amoeba-like reproduction) always uses specific signals to determine fitness for reproduction. If we take birds as an example, then the prime criterion for their breeding standards can be based upon anything from physical size, aggression, plumage, song repertoire, nesting ability, territorial control or proven food-gathering ability to name but a few.
Humans are not so very different within this scheme of things. Even in times and places where marriages are or were arranged by virtue of economic rationality or dynastic considerations, physical conjugation based on mutual attraction still happened outside of the marriage contract. In fact, it was so common that, rather than risk internecine warfare, a blind eye was turned to ‘affairs of the heart’ and the occurrence was regarded as something simply inevitable.
And inevitable it was. The human sexual instinct is an incredibly powerful thing. Indeed it needs to be for all human life depends upon it for continued existence.
During that initial glance when one decides whether an individual falls into the category of being reproductively desirable, the primary factors that are taken into account (especially by women) are physical symmetry, especially in the face (a sign of genetic health) actual physique (in judging men, height and broad shoulders count for more than a pot belly) and a healthy head of good quality hair. In the case of a shaven head, a healthy, even, facial skin tone gets taken into account instead.
These immediate visual clues take less than a moment or so to register and if a person fails to give a less than glowing first impression then they have a great deal of work to do to make up the lost ground. As a result, men who are short, fat and balding have to go out of their way to emphasise their social power instead of their genetic health. These displays stereotypically include big cars, sharp tailoring and fat cigars. These men also surround themselves with subservient males; insist on being loud and dominant around other males and keeping the trappings of wealth and social status on obvious display. None of which goes unnoticed by other males, or those females that would prefer a comfortable lifestyle as opposed to a procreative one.
Females, of course, in every culture ever examined, ancient and modern, have used cosmetics to enhance their appeal. Two of the first products ever used were red colouring applied to the cheeks, and red, waxy substances to the lips, both of which were used to imitate the signs of fertility, robust health and procreative willingness. They are still used today. Female clothing is also used to indicate availability and willingness to consider mating, as is the length and way the hair is worn. There is not a single human culture that has ever existed where the women within it did not groom, style and adorn their hair to proclaim their sexual status.
It is very little wonder, then, that both sexes go to extraordinary lengths to keep their hair in good condition. It forms one of our most basic social drives, along with shared levels of hygiene and agreed cultural dress codes.
Your hair’s condition might be important - but actually keeping it is even more so. Now you know why.
Chapter Three
Skin
Hair does not appear overnight all of its own accord but can be seen to somehow grow outward from within the skin over time. So we really ought to start with this substrate. In other words if we want to understand what makes hair grow and how to keep it growing then we should begin with an examination of the skin itself.
Skin is the largest organ of the human body. In an adult, it covers roughly twenty square feet or so. A tall, fat man will obviously have more of it than a petite, eight-stone girl; but, by averaging it out, each human has enough of it to roughly cover one side of an ordinary house front door, including the letter box.
This skin is about one tenth of an inch thick. Again, that is just an average. The skin on the palms of the hands will be fairly thick, while the skin of the eyelids (at just one fiftieth of an inch) correspondingly thinner. Within this average one tenth of an inch are two distinct layers. These layers do not depend upon location but exist whether the skin is thick, thin or somewhere in-between. From the bottom up they are called the dermis and the epidermis. Within each of them are even thinner, but just as microscopically obvious, layers. The epidermis, for instance, comprises five such further layers.
Each square inch of this skin has, again on average, twenty capillary blood vessels, 650 sweat glands, 1,000 nerve endings and 60,000 melanocyte cells (the ones that produce the skin’s colouration and which respond to sunlight exposure). The average lump of skin hanging over the average human frame will have 2,880 such square inches.
The skin is one of our primary interfaces with the outside world. (It is not our only one, obviously; most people also have eyes and ears). This interface has evolved over millions of years to perform at least ten separately identifiable tasks.
It forms a tough, self-repairing, physical barrier against abrasion and penetrative damage from the external world.
It forms a living, chemically active barrier against the entry of pathogens (actual and potential).
It provides sensory information about the external world for our central nervous system. This information includes such basic ‘measurements’ as those of heat, pressure and vibration.
It allows for rapid and very precise internal temperature control. Those twenty capillaries per square inch are far more than is needed to simply deliver nutritive substances to the skin layers. By altering the diameter of the blood vessels, heat can be rapidly lost by radiation, convection and conduction. Constricting their diameter, on the other hand, greatly reduces their volume and, therefore, consequent heat loss. The skin also uses automatically controlled sweat glands to govern its own surface temperature through evaporative fluid loss.
It controls our internal fluid levels. It stops any significant inflow of water because it is an oil-covered barrier that is only semi-permeable in the first place. The skin also provides protection against internal fluid egress.
It has a fat storage function and can, additionally, also store a significant