I'm losing handfuls of hair. What should I check before buying anything?

Hair shedding is one of the places where the classical reading and a blood test answer different questions.

Diffuse shedding usually has a cause you can find, and it is often not the scalp: ferritin (iron stores, not just haemoglobin), thyroid, vitamin D, recent crash dieting or major illness - shedding starts about two to three months after the trigger - childbirth, and medication changes. Patchy, round bald areas, scalp scaling with broken hairs, or shedding with period irregularity and jawline acne each point somewhere specific and deserve a dermatologist or bloods rather than supplements. Chinese medicine traditionally links hair to blood and to kidney essence, so practitioners ask about sleep, recent illness or loss, dryness, low back weakness and the tongue - a pattern description, not a substitute for ferritin. One caution: high-dose biotin is widely sold for hair and it interferes with common lab tests, including thyroid and cardiac markers, so stop it days before bloodwork and tell whoever draws it. Also skip unlabelled topical products; the pattern of hidden steroids in those is well documented.

Qicura reads a described symptom against this kind of material and returns a pattern in plain language with the sources named. It does not dispense: no herb quantities, no formula composition, no preparation instructions, and no needling technique - those are deliberate limits enforced on the server, not wording we soften for a page.

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