The ninety-day
diagnostic.

When a patient walked into my Gangnam clinic for the first time, I did not reach for a prescription pad. I reached for a page of questions. When did you last sleep seven uninterrupted hours? How hot is your shower? How many products touch your scalp between washing and drying? Do you wear your hair back or down on the days you feel well? The questions were embarrassingly pedestrian and almost always more diagnostic than the scalp biopsy that would follow.

I called it the ninety-day diagnostic because I would ask the patient to answer the same questions ninety days later. Between the two answers, the only variable I introduced was: do less, do it longer, do it at night. That was the entire prescription on the first visit. No shampoo change. No supplements. No tonic.

Out of thirty-eight patients tracked over two years, twenty-nine reported improvement at the ninety-day follow-up on nothing more than cadence. The nine who did not were the ones whose underlying cause was medical — thyroid, iron, post-partum telogen effluvium — and those nine needed the kind of intervention a serum cannot provide. I referred them onward. The twenty-nine went on to do better with less.

The reason I tell this story now is that Meori is not a substitute for that diagnostic. It is the answer to what to do after you have taken the diagnostic. Three drops, four nights a week, ninety days — the cadence half of what I used to prescribe verbally, compressed into the only bottle I would stake my name on.

If you are reading this because you are worried about your hair, please do the diagnostic first. Answer the questions. Write the answers down. Ninety days from now, write them again. If the answers have moved on nothing more than cadence, Meori is a useful next object. If the answers have not moved, please see a dermatologist — and if you are in Seoul, tell them you read this.