Are Your Hair Products Increasing Your Risk For Uterine Cancer?

Welcome back today, we're talking about hair and why it matters so much to us and seemingly everyone else, Beauty, writer, Blake Newby is still with us. Also joining us now is board certified dermatologist, Dr uchina. Okay, she is a hair and scalp specialist who's been highlighted in women's health Allure, Cosmopolitan. She spent over 10 years, helping patients find peace and healing about their hair and their bodies joining us now. Thank you so much so much we're sitting here. We happen to all be three black women, but we know hair is not just a black woman's, it is definitely we are the only country that had to have a law, the crown act, to keep it from being a use of discrimination. So that said, you have patience from all walks of life and this show is called the root of the matter, the root of it all. What is at the root of hair? Being such a source of Pride, such a source of insecurity and controversy for us for people for all people, no truly, it is because really our hair is our Crown right. This is what we see when we first wake up and look at ourselves in the morning, and if we don't like the reflection that is coming back to us, it takes down our confidence, it reduces our self-esteem and it impacts how we show up in the world And how we interact with our family and friends, you know it's interesting because Blake talked about the expense of keeping natural hair. Again any Salon you walk in, I don't care the ethnic Identity or race of the clients. Are there hair costs money to maintain? If you are coloring your hair blonde right now in a salon near me, get your credit card out, because it's going to cost you money, you know any a haircut, a hair trim. We again focus a lot on the conversation. I think, especially in daytime television from the perspective of women of color, because there's you know the Hulu series hair tales that Oprah Winfrey and and Tracey Ellis Ross. But at the end of the day we saw that man who's going quit ball and he created this beautiful hair piece for himself. They look gorgeous with it so for men, especially young men, who are dealing with hair loss, it's a sensitivity and expensive sensitive. It'S an expensive sensitivity and I'm glad that you brought up the aspect of men who suffer from hair loss because I think a lot of times. We think that when men lose their hair well, they should be used to it. They'Re men, oh yeah, like they all shave it and they look like Thai digs they don't right, but everyone has that um that luxury. So it is devastating. You know, particularly if it's someone who's built, who their whole identity really or how they see. Themselves has been built around their hair, it's not just cosmetic, it's definitely an emotional thing. I want to talk to you about the health aspect of it too, because um Blake got a lot of people talking to her about the health aspect of relaxers. We saw that class action lawsuit filed. We know that one of the manufacturers said they stand by their product, but when I um you know became pregnant with my son, the first thing people said was: don't color your hair. I remember seeing Kelly Ripa talk about. You know not wanting to color her hair after she got pregnant with one of her children and having that big debate over it. So even the the color process now we're having real conversations about what that potentially can do to one's health. We definitely are, and I think it's an important conversation really an overdue conversation. Really it's overdue. Okay. It is overdue because when we think about it, a lot of these products have what we call endocrine disrupting chemicals right and with these endocrine disrupting chemicals. If uh one has a hormonally driven cancer, like you like you're doing cancer or breast cancer, we don't know whether we don't know for sure whether this might increase their risk of having such. Are you finding more people coming in asking you that question about coloring their hair bleaching, their hair relaxing their hair? Is it really link to these health issues? So here's the thing where you still don't really know. We don't know we still don't really know so. The study that came out - that's you, know, gotten a lot of press in the last week. It really looked at whether hair products um if there was an association with hair product use and the the development of uterine cancer in women and what they found was that in the black women that were in this study, they had an increased risk of developing uterine Cancer, if they had ever used chemical relaxes in their of life ever used, it ever used it now if they use it frequently, which the study defined as more than four or more times per year, they had a two-fold increased risk of developing uterine cancer. Okay, so already uterine cancer is a common uh. Cancer gynecological cancer in the United States and black women were at risk for developing it anyway. So the question really is: are you know, are we putting ourselves in a situation whereby we're making ourselves more likely to have this outcome? We don't know this, yet we don't know now. To be honest, this is just one study. Okay sure we're not going to hang our hat on this and there are several limitations to the study number one. All of the participants were women whose sister had a history of breast cancer. So again I mean that really is a narrow scope. Okay, so let's just be clear on that: additionally, they did not look at the duration of use, so whether you use it for 10, 20. 30. 40. 50 years. You know this chemical I've had at 50, 40 years every six to eight weeks. Okay, I mean that's just I'm just being real, that's been my schedule, I went natural for I think Johnny and I went natural for a year. So since I've been relaxing my hair, I think I've gone natural for about a year. Okay and I loved it, but with short hair, it was just a lot more work for us and it's a lot more work and yeah and I think that's a challenge for a lot of folks. You know, because I mean I'm natural I've been natural for about seven years. I went natural in a very unlikely place when I was in residency in Iowa, but I was it was so welcome. They were so welcoming and so open and encouraging of me going through that journey, and so I think it takes time it takes patience right. It'S not an easy thing: it's not an easy conversations, as we saw with Blake. Are you going to go back natural at any point? The study shook me up a little bit. It is I'm not going to lie um I'll, probably will just do them less frequently until I figure out there's still a gap, there's still a hole for safe, permanent straighteners