Gentler Hair Health Options
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Hair, Gently
We have previously talked about the medicinal options for combatting the thinning hair that comes with age especially for men, but also for a lot of women. You can read about those medicinal options here:
Hair-Loss Remedies, By Science
We also did a whole supplement spotlight research review for saw palmetto! You can read about how that might help you keep your hair present and correct, here:
One Man’s Saw Palmetto Is Another Woman’s Serenoa Repens
Today we’re going to talk options that are less “heavy guns”, and/but still very useful.
Supplementation
First, the obvious. Taking vitamins and minerals, especially biotin, can help a lot. This writer takes 10,000µg (that’s micrograms, not milligrams!) biotin gummies, similar to this example product on Amazon (except mine also has other vitamins and minerals in, but the exact product doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon).
When thinking “what vitamins and minerals help hair?”, honestly, it’s most of them. So, focus on the ones that count for the most (usually: biotin and zinc), and then cover your bases for the rest with good diet and additional supplementation if you wish.
Caffeine (topical)
It may feel silly, giving one’s hair a stimulant, but topical caffeine application really does work to stimulate hair growth. And not “just a little help”, either:
❝Specifically, 0.2% topical caffeine-based solutions are typically safe with very minimal adverse effects for long-term treatment of AGA, and they are not inferior to topical 5% minoxidil therapy❞
(AGA = Androgenic Alopecia)
Argan oil
As with coconut oil, argan oil is great on hair. It won’t do a thing to improve hair growth or decrease hair shedding, but it will help you hair stay moisturized and thus reduce breakage—thus, may not be relevant for everyone, but for those of us with hair long enough to brush, it’s important.
Bonus: get an argan oil based hair serum that also contains keratin (the protein used to make hair), as this helps strengthen the hair too.
Here’s an example product on Amazon
Silk pillowcases
Or a silk hair bonnet to sleep in! They both do the same thing, which is prevent damaging the hair in one’s sleep by reducing the friction that it may have when moving/turning against the pillow in one’s sleep.
- Pros of the bonnet: if you have lots of hair and a partner in bed with you, your hair need not be in their face, and you also won’t get it caught under you or them.
- Pros of the pillowcase: you don’t have to wear a bonnet
Both are also used widely by people without hair loss issues, but with easily damaged and/or tangled hair—Black people especially with 3C or tighter curls in particular often benefit from this. Other people whose hair is curly and/or gray also stand to gain a lot.
Here are Amazon example products of a silk pillowcase (it’s expensive, but worth it) and a silk bonnet, respectively
Want to read more?
You might like this article:
From straight to curly, thick to thin: here’s how hormones and chemotherapy can change your hair
Take care!
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Woman Petitions Health Insurer After Company Approves — Then Rejects — Her Infusions
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When KFF Health News published an article in August about the “prior authorization hell” Sally Nix said she went through to secure approval from her insurance company for the expensive monthly infusions she needs, we thought her story had a happy ending.
That’s because, after KFF Health News sent questions to Nix’s insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, it retroactively approved $36,000 worth of treatments she thought she owed. Even better, she also learned she would qualify for the infusions moving forward.
Good news all around — except it didn’t last for long. After all, this is the U.S. health care system, where even patients with good insurance aren’t guaranteed affordable care.
To recap: For more than a decade, Nix, of Statesville, North Carolina, has suffered from autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, and fatigue, as well as a condition called trigeminal neuralgia, which is marked by bouts of electric shock-like pain that’s so intense it’s commonly known as the “suicide disease.”
“It is a pain that sends me to my knees,” Nix said in October. “My entire family’s life is controlled by the betrayal of my body. We haven’t lived normally in 10 years.”
Late in 2022, Nix started receiving intravenous immunoglobulin infusions to treat her diseases. She started walking two miles a day with her service dog. She could picture herself celebrating, free from pain, at her daughter’s summer 2024 wedding.
“I was so hopeful,” she said.
But a few months after starting those infusions, she found out that her insurance company wouldn’t cover their cost anymore. That’s when she started “raising Cain about it” on Instagram and Facebook.
You probably know someone like Sally Nix — someone with a chronic or life-threatening illness whose doctor says they need a drug, procedure, or scan, and whose insurance company has replied: No.
Prior authorization was conceived decades ago to rein in health care costs by eliminating duplicative and ineffective treatment. Not only does overtreatment waste billions of dollars every year, but doctors acknowledge it also potentially harms patients.
However, critics worry that prior authorization has now become a way for health insurance companies to save money, sometimes at the expense of patients’ lives. KFF Health News has heard from hundreds of people in the past year relating their prior authorization horror stories.
When we first met Nix, she was battling her insurance company to regain authorization for her infusions. She’d been forced to pause her treatments, unable to afford $13,000 out-of-pocket for each infusion.
Finally, it seemed like months of her hard work had paid off. In July, Nix was told by staff at both her doctor’s office and her hospital that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois would allow her to restart treatment. Her balance was marked “paid” and disappeared from the insurer’s online portal.
But the day after the KFF Health News story was published, Nix said, she learned the message had changed. After restarting treatment, she received a letter from the insurer saying her diagnoses didn’t actually qualify her for the infusions. It felt like health insurance whiplash.
“They’re robbing me of my life,” she said. “They’re robbing me of so much, all because of profit.”
Dave Van de Walle, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, said the company would not discuss individual patients’ cases.
“Prior authorization is often a requirement for certain treatments,” Van de Walle said in a written statement, “and BCBSIL administers benefits according to medical policy and the employer’s benefit.”
But Nix is a Southern woman of the “Steel Magnolia” variety. In other words, she’s not going down without a fight.
In September, she called out her insurance company’s tactics in a http://change.org/ campaign that has garnered more than 21,000 signatures. She has also filed complaints against her insurance company with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Labor, Illinois Department of Insurance, and Illinois attorney general.
Even so, Nix said, she feels defeated.
Not only is she still waiting for prior authorization to restart her immunoglobulin infusions, but her insurance company recently required Nix to secure preapproval for another treatment — routine numbing injections she has received for nearly 10 years to treat the nerve pain caused by trigeminal neuralgia.
“It is reprehensible what they’re doing. But they’re not only doing it to me,” said Nix, who is now reluctantly taking prescription opioids to ease her pain. “They’re doing it to other patients. And it’s got to stop.”
Do you have an experience with prior authorization you’d like to share? Click here to tell your story.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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Top 5 Anti-Aging Exercises
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There are some exercises that get called such things as “The King of Exercises!”, but how well-earned is that title and could it be that actually a mix of the top few is best?
The Exercises
While you don’t have to do all 5, your body will thank you if you are able to:
- Plank: strengthens most of the body, and can reduce back pain while improving posture.
- Squats: another core-strengthening exercise, this time with an emphasis on the lower body, which makes for strong foundations (including strong ankles, knees, and hips). Improves circulation also, and what’s good for circulation is good for the organs, including the brain!
- Push-ups: promotes very functional strength and fitness; great for alternating with planks, as despite their similar appearance, they work the abs and back more, respectively.
- Lunges: these are great for lower body strength and stability, and doing these greatly reduces the risk of falling.
- Glute Bridges: this nicely rounds off one’s core strength, increasing stability and improving posture, as well as reducing lower back pain too.
If the benefits of these seem to overlap a little, it’s because they do! But each does some things that the others don’t, so put together, they make for a very well-balanced workout.
For advice on how to do each of them, plus more about the muscles being used and the benefits, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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The Daily Stoic – by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman
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What’s this, a philosophy book in a health and productivity newsletter? Well, look at it this way: Aristotle basically wrote the “How To Win Friends And Influence People” of his day, and Plato before him wrote a book about management.
In this (chiefly modern!) book, we see what the later Stoic philosophers had to say about getting the most out of life—which is also what we’re about, here at 10almonds!
We tend to use the word “stoic” in modern English to refer to a person who is resolute in the face of hardship. The traditional meaning does encompass that, but also means a lot more: a whole, rounded, philosophy of life.
Philosophy in general is not an easy thing into which to “dip one’s toe”. No matter where we try to start, it seems, it turns out there were a thousand other things we needed to read first!
This book really gets around that. The format is:
- There’s a theme for each month
- Each month has one lesson per day
- Each daily lesson starts with some words from a renowned stoic philosopher, and then provides commentary on such
- The commentary provides a jumping-off point and serves as a prompt to actually, genuinely, reflect and apply the ideas.
Unlike a lot of “a year of…” day-by-day books, this is not light reading, by the way, and you are getting a weighty tome for your money.
But, the page-length daily lessons are indeed digestible—which, again, is what we like at 10almonds!
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The Good, The Bad, & The Vigorously Debated
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This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics:
One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis
Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.
What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.
Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.
This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:
Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke
Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?
Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.
These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.
It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.
It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).
Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask
Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way
A matter of life and death
Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.
While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of
- “my body, my choice” vs
- “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,
…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because
- “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and
- “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”
…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.
In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:
Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?
Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.
Take care!
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Bird Flu: Children At High Risk; Older Adults Not So Much
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In this week’s news roundup…
Children at highest risk for bird flu
When a new infectious disease comes out, we get used to hearing the usual refrain, “children, the elderly, those with compromised immune systems” are those considered at greatest risk, and therefore first in line for vaccines.
In this case, however, it seems that older adults appear to be rather more resilient to bird flu than children, and it’s noted that early childhood influenza exposure can elicit immune responses that last a lifetime. For those whose lifetime was not curtailed by the initial infection, that means they may enjoy extra defenses now.
You may be wondering whether this headline statement is just a hypothesis based on that, and no, it’s not. It’s a (albeit tentative, like most things in any emerging science, as responses to a novel infection will always be) conclusion based on blood samples from a little over 150 people born between 1927 and 2026 (so, quite a range), and examining the antibodies found therein; adults born prior to 1968 are the ones who are most likely to have been exposed to H1N1 or H2N2 in childhood, resulting in them now having antibodies that work against the H5N1 virus (but still, by all means please do take all sensible precautions anyway!):
Read in full: Older adults might be more resistant to bird flu infections than children, research finds
Related: What you need to know about H5N1 bird flu
GLP-1 Receptor Agonists? They work, but at what cost?
We’re not talking about the side effects this time! Nor even the “what happens if you stop taking it” problems.
Rather, the “cost” in this case is the literal financial cost; out of a selection of weight loss drugs examined, semaglutide (such as Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (such as Zepbound and Eli Lilly) were the only ones deemed to not be cost-effective for patients:
Read in full: Semaglutide, tirzepatide not deemed cost-effective obesity therapies despite benefits
Related: Most People Who Start GLP-1 RAs Quit Them Within A Year (Here’s Why)
Inflammation now, brittle bones later
Chronic inflammation is a root cause of many diseases (due in part to how it weakens the immune system, but also because of how the body functions so badly in general when it’s constantly at war with itself, as is the case in chronic inflammation), and it worsens many diseases that it doesn’t outright cause.
In this case, the new science is that chronic inflammation also makes changes to bone density over time.
Spoiler: the changes are not good changes
Furthermore, this holds true for young people also, not just people in the usual demographic that one would expect for brittle bones (especially: older women with untreated menopause, but also just anyone older than middle-aged in general, as most people start losing about 1% of bone density per year after their mid-30s).
Read in full: Inflammation proteins linked to bone density changes over time
Related: The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis
Take care!
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Myofascial Training – by Ester Albini
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Fascia is an oft-forgotten part of the body—if something that is so ubiquitous and varied can be described as a single part. And yet, it arguably is—precisely because it is the connective tissue that holds everything else together, so by its nature, it’s ultimately a one-piece thing.
This “one-piece thing” is responsible for permitting us movement, and is also responsible for restricting our movement. As such, when it comes to mobility, we can stretch our muscles all day long and it won’t mean a thing if our fascia is stiff. And notably, fascia has a much slower turnover time (in terms of how quickly the body replaces it) than muscle, so fascia is almost always going to be the limiting factor.
Pilates instructor (with many certifications) Albini gives the reader the tools to loosen up that limiting factor. It’ll take time and consistency (it takes the body around 18 months to fully rebuild fascia, so that’s the timeframe for an ultimate “job done” to then just be maintained), but there are also some results to be enjoyed immediately, by virtue of myofascial release
In style, the book is half textbook, half workbook. She explains a lot of the anatomy and physiology of fascia (and does so very well). This book is, in this reviewer’s opinion, better than the usual go-to professional guidebook to fascia (i.e., for physiotherapists etc) that costs more than twice the price and is half as clear (the other book’s diagrams are unnecessarily abstract, the photos fuzzy, and the prose tedious). This book, in contrast, has very clear diagrams, hundreds of high-quality color photos, and excellent explanations that are aimed at the layperson, and/but aren’t afraid to get technical either; she just explains the technicalities well too.
The workbook side of things is a vast array of exercises to do, including for specific issues and to combat various lifestyle problems, as well as to just support general health and more mobility than most people think is possible for them.
Bottom line: if you’d like better mobility and have been neglecting your fascia (or have been a bit confused by it), this book is going to be your new best friend.
Click there to check out Myofascial Training, and free your body’s movements!
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