Alan Bauman, M.D.: The science of male and female hair restoration - how to protect, enhance, and restore the appearance and health of the hair and scalp

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Dr. Alan Bauman, a hair transplant surgeon who is one of the few people who is actually board certified in hair transplantation. There are lots of hair transplant surgeons out there, but Alan is one of the very few who's actually board certified. And I've gotten to know Alan very well because one of my patients, actually two of my patients went to him for procedures a couple of years ago. I was sort of blown away by the results because the best hair transplants are the ones where after the fact you have no clue that the patient had a hair transplant. Got to know him better and was impressed immediately by how open he was to all of my questions. And believe me, there were a lot of questions. Before I refer one of my patients to another physician, especially a physician who's going to do a procedure on them, I want to be able to vet the heck out of them and I want to understand how they're doing what they're doing. And internally, we put together summaries of the stuff that we learned. And Alan was so gracious in his ability to share his data, share his insights, acknowledge what he didn't know, that over the past couple of years, I've sent more and more patients to him who have inquired about both surgical and non-surgical solutions to hair loss. And this is of course true for both men and women. So at some point I said, Alan, we need to sit down and talk about this. And Alan is of course one of the experts in the world on this topic. He's treated over 20,000 patients. He's done over 8,000 hair transplants. The thing about this that's interesting is you come to learn as I learned that this is a problem that both men and women think about. And so in this episode, we talk about what hair loss looks like in both men and women. And it turns out that pretty much nobody goes through their life without some change in their hair pattern. Now for men, I think it's a little more obvious. We see the results of hair loss, but of course any woman who's been pregnant knows that just there and then she's going to experience a dramatic change in her pattern of both gaining hair and then losing hair post pregnancy. But of course for many women, this changes as they get older. And once they go through menopause, and I think most women aren't aware of some of the solutions that exist, maybe as much as men are. So we talk in great detail about what the non-surgical or non-invasive approaches are. And there turn out to be many more than I had ever understood or even appreciated. And I think Alan does a great job of explaining those. And then of course there are many invasive things such as PRP that would be even pre-surgical. And then of course within the surgical side of hair restoration, like anything, I suppose there are many different techniques and they have advantages, disadvantages. And Alan does a great job here of explaining the method that he has chosen and why I think it certainly seems to produce unbelievable results in the cases that I've seen. This is an episode that has been, I've been asked about a lot in social media. So this is a great example of bugging the heck out of me over social media for topics that you want to hear about. And both men and women have said, please interview somebody who's an expert on hair restoration. And so with that said, please continue to ask about things that you're interested in hearing about. And hopefully I'll be able to continue to find exceptional people with whom to bring expertise to you. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Alan Bauman. Hey, Alan, thanks for making time today.