Her name is Vicky. She is 45, a yoga instructor who runs retreats. Low stress. Eats well. The kind of woman who, if you passed her in a grocery store, you would assume had this whole thing figured out.

She had been losing hair since the day she gave birth. Not for a season. For thirteen years.

She told Joanna Dallman she could have knit a sweater out of what came out of her head every three or four days. Thirteen years of collecting it off her shirts, her pillow, her yoga mat. Thirteen years of being told some version of it is hormonal, it is postpartum, it will settle.

It stopped in one week.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I have been a nurse practitioner for 25 years and that number does something to me. Thirteen years of a woman's life. One week of the right investigation.

Why I brought Joanna on

If you have been reading me for a while, you know hair loss comes up constantly in my practice. Perimenopausal women. Thyroid patients. Women carrying chronic stress loads they stopped noticing years ago. It is one of the first things the body does when something upstream is wrong, and it is one of the last things anyone takes seriously.

Joanna Dallman is known as the Alopecia Angel. She reversed her own rapidly progressing alopecia areata after more than ten physicians offered her nothing. One of them, in Europe, told her to stop wearing ponytails. She had never worn ponytails.

She was in her early 30s at the time, living in Miami, working at Apple, in the best shape of her life. Her hairdresser found the bald spot during routine highlights and diagnosed her right there in the chair. She looked the word up on her phone and started crying, not at the photos, but at the two options every search result gave her: accept that you may go bald, or take medications for life.

She was also dating the man she would marry, and she wanted to be a mother. So she asked the question almost nobody had asked her: what will these drugs do to my fertility?

Nobody had told her. She decided not to find out the hard way.

Three and a half years of root cause work later, her hair was growing back. She got pregnant at 40, on the first try. She now works with clients in more than 67 countries.

The number that reframes everything

Ninety percent of her clients see hair growth in under eight weeks.

Shedding stops, on average, somewhere between week one and week six.

And if a woman has alopecia totalis or universalis, meaning complete or near-complete loss, she can grow a full buzz cut or pixie in about six months.

Eight weeks. I have watched women spend eight years on this.

Three things I am still thinking about

The first is that we are all reaching for hormones because that is the story we have been handed. I am a hormone health NP. This is my field. And Joanna said, gently but plainly, that women blame their hormones for everything and it is usually not the answer. She is right. Vicky was thirteen years past delivery. Whatever hormone shift happened at birth was long over. The trigger was somewhere else entirely, and nobody looked because everyone had a satisfying explanation already.

The second is Botox and breast implants. Both are documented triggers of autoimmune activity. Neither appears on a standard hair loss workup, because nobody asks. Joanna asks about every procedure a woman has had, every product in her house, every food she eats because a label told her it was healthy. She reads what she calls the resume: the whole history, not the last page.

The third is the one that made me angry. She reviews labs her clients already paid for, from practitioners in the US and abroad, and she routinely finds abnormalities that were flagged and then never addressed. Not missed. Documented and ignored. Women spend six, nine, ten years managing a condition that had its answer sitting in a chart the whole time.

That is not healthcare. That is filing.

What functional investigation actually makes possible

Here is what changes for a woman who acts on this.

She stops buying things. No more Nutrafol, Viviscal, Rogaine, laser cap, another shampoo, another bottle of biotin she read about at midnight. Joanna's line on all of it is the cleanest summary I have heard: nothing on a shelf is personalized to you. She is not against technology, and neither am I. Red light has a place. But layering a tool on a weak foundation is a gimmick, and you cannot out-supplement a diet or an exposure you have not dealt with.

Instead, she gets a full intake, a real history, her own data, and a plan built for her specific life. And what comes back is rarely only the hair. When Joanna turned the corner, the thing she noticed first was not regrowth. It was that she recognized herself in a mirror she had been avoiding for four years. The insomnia, the anxiety, the brain fog she could not name, the dry eyes, the grocery list she could not hold in her head. All of it went away over the following weeks.

She said she felt like she had gone from 30 to 80 overnight, and then came back.

One more thing

Joanna told me about giving birth in the Netherlands at 40, during COVID, where she was not permitted to see a physician at all because the threshold for a doctor is twins. Midwife only. Two ultrasounds and one urine test in nine months. So she researched her way through it, found the evidence on eating dates in the third trimester, and delivered a ten-pound baby at home in thirteen hours with no epidural.

She said something about how I have not stopped turning over. That the four years of fighting for answers about her hair is what prepared her to advocate for herself in that delivery room. The smaller trial equipping her for the larger one. Nothing wasted.

That is the whole thing, really. The body is always communicating. Hair loss is not the enemy; it is a message. And when we come at our health with curiosity instead of fear, we give ourselves the best possible chance of hearing what our bodies are actually trying to say.

Your body is not broken. Go ask it a better question.

Watch the full conversation with Joanna: https://www.youtube.com/live/St23BjObkzM

Read the full written breakdown, including the five root causes and my clinical notes: [PENDING BLOG URL]

Work with Joanna: https://hairnheal.com/offers-181071?am_id=cristy3188

(That is an affiliate link. Blue Veil Wellness may earn a commission at no cost to you. I only share links for practitioners whose work I would trust with my own patients.)

If you want your own hormone data before you change anything, start here.

In His Grace and Health,

Cristy Murray, MSN, APRN, FNP-C

Blue Veil Wellness