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New Hope
BEIJING, Jan. 24 - His pate gleaming like a freshly peeled potato,
the man waited expectantly in the whitewashed room, the buoyant confidence
of a lottery ticket buyer lighting his eyes.
Dr. Zhao Zhangguang dipped a small brush into a plastic bottle filled
with an apricot-colored liquid and began daubing the hairless dome
in a sort of invisible pointillism. On the bottle containing the liquid,
a gold label read: "101 Hair Regeneration Liniment."
The substance is among an array of elixirs, syrups and potions produced
by doctors here in a crusade to retard or even reverse baldness. Most
prominent in the crusade is Dr. Zhao, who has produced a substance
that is championed by some Beijing city officials and that is inspiring
hope among those sporting nature's tonsure.
Former Barefoot Doctor
"I used to be a barefoot doctor," Dr. Zhao, 45 years old,
said, his own shaggy thatch evidence that he does not need a dose
of his own medicine. "I am from the mountains in Zhejiang. In
the mountains, we pay a lot of attention to plants and herbs."
"Basically, I was trained in herbal medicine, treating skin disease.
What got me started in treating hair loss was the case of a schoolteacher
who came to me one day in 1973. She was bald. Even though she wore
a wig, everyone still called her bald. After a while, she stopped
teaching because the people made fun of her. Whenever she went to
her mother’s house, she had to take an alternative route rather
than the main road to avoid being seen and ridiculed.”
Dr. Zhao lit a cigarette, dragged deeply and continued. "Well,
this was how I started to think about this problem. I was a bit famous
for curing skin disease, but had no experience with hair. So I decided
to have a try with traditional herbs."
In the beginning, Dr. Zhao said he began by mixing herbs and oils
that were traditionally believed to stimulate hair growth, things
like the dried Rhizome of Rehmannia or tubers of multiflower knot
weed.
"Those just don't work," Dr. Zhao said. "Everyone thinks
they do, but they don't. In the beginning, I was using a bit more
here, a bit less there. There was no effect at all."
I Kept On Working
After about 40 failures, Dr. Zhao said, he was ready to throw up his
hands. "People said I was mad," he said. "They scorned
me. They didn't think I would be successful. That did it. I kept on
working."
While he was working on a solution, his money ran out and he had to
rent out one of the three rooms of his house to another villager.
"I still didn't have enough money," he said, "My wife
said that she would support me and she started raising pigs and chickens."
What the Liniment Contains
Altogether, Dr. Zhao said, he whipped up 101 different mixtures before
he hit on the right concoction. "I had a bald patient who came
to me because he had a fever and skin rash," Dr. Zhao explained.
"I gave him a new medicine I had been working on. One day he
came over and started yelling at me that I hadn't cured the fever
but that he was growing hair."
Word spread. First villagers from around his home county came by,
then people beyond the county. “In the first group of 50 patients,
the concoction was quite effective,” the doctor said. “I
made some changes and the effect was even greater.”
What did the trick, Dr. Zhao said, was the careful blending of ginseng,
the root of membranous milk vetch, Chinese Angelica, a type of Aconitum,
dried ginger, walnut meat, salflower, the root of red-rooted Salvia,
a psoralea and alcohol.
Word spread some more. In 1976, a reporter from Hangzhou came by to
look into rumours that there were no bald men in Dr. Zhao's county
anymore. The reporter, Pan Guozheng, happened to be bald.
"He came to see me," Dr. Zhao said. "Of course he didn't
believe anything, but I gave him some of my medicine and after about
three months, his hair began to grow again. Then he wrote a report.
That was the start."
Success
The newspaper invited Dr. Zhao to Hangzhou to try his remedy in the
big city. Over several years, he said, he treated more than 1,000
patients there with a success rate of more than 90 percent.
In Beijing, a group of city officials heard of advancing hairlines
down south and sent a delegation to see what the excitement was about.
By this time, Dr. Zhao said, he had compiled a hefty caseload of satisfied
patients and had his liniment certified by the provincial authorities
as effective.
Officials from Beijing's Bureau of Civil Affairs wooed the good doctor
with promises of housing, a factory of his own and fame. So in 1986,
Dr. Zhao moved to the capital and set up a plant to produce "101
Hair Regeneration Liniment."
Word spread and soon Dr. Zhao found himself traveling to Hong Kong
and Japan bearing hope for the hopeless. Then, last October, he was
awarded the top prize at the 38th Brussels Eureka World Fair, a gathering
of inventors from around the globe. Dr. Zhao was made a Chevalier
and awarded a lustrous white cross dangling from a red ribbon. |
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