Over the decades, the pharmaceutical industry has done a wonderful job in convincing us there's always a drug to solve a medical problem. Indeed, if you listen to some critics, they will tell you Big Pharma invents a medical problem and then develops a drug to treat it (in some cases, it may be the other way round). This has undermined the status of the doctors and surgeons who used to rule the roost. In the dim and distant days before we had basic drugs like penicillin, doctors used their experience to pull people through serious illnesses. If you were injured, surgeons sewed you back together again. It was a good team effort all round. How fast things change in seventy years.

If you look around the country right now, you will actually see a lot of men losing their hair. Those whose business it is to guess how many, estimate the number to be around 30 million. Using the most neutral written voice possible, it seems the majority of these men begin losing their hair before they reach the age of 35. There are many possible causes suggested. In the top position comes genetics. It's all the fault of your wife's brother's uncle if you were born in a month with an 'r' in it. This is not to say there's no evidence that male pattern badness runs in families. It often does and through the female line. But we're no closer to explaining precisely how genes might be contributing to this problem. Nor is there any prospect of being able to do anything about it even if we could identify which genes are misbehaving. Then we get into the usual list of lifestyle choices with excessive alcohol consumption, smoking and unhealthy diets all blamed. And then there's stress. If all else fails, experts say we're worrying our hair into falling out. Or perhaps you have a tendency to pull your hair out when under stress - doctors who like to name these problems call this trichotillomania.

So, if you have male pattern baldness, the pharmaceutical industry has come up with the cure - Propecia was an accidental discovery, but the researchers did recognize what they had when the trial results came in. For everyone else, the surgeons have an answer. If you have the money, they will introduce you to the world of hair implants. This borrows from the world of farming. To plant seedlings, you carefully remove them from position A, keeping all their roots intact, and then place them carefully in a newly dug hole at position B. So the surgeon takes three or four hairs as a unit from a part of your head where the hair grows vigorously and replants them into a bald area. Unfortunately there's no guarantee the hair will grow in the new position and there's quite a high risk of infection. So you could end up with two sets of holes in your scalp where no hair grows, and all this can cost you about $10,000 a procedure. Expensive and results are not guaranteed! So if you have male pattern baldness, use Propecia as soon as it is diagnosed. Otherwise, learn to live with the baldness.