Hi everyone!

I am writing you today with some promising news for those who suffer from TTM. I, too, have the disorder and have pulled from my scalp for nearly 30 years. I had two small remissions during the times I weaned both of my girls from breastfeeding. The remissions lasted about a month each time. That was the first time I suspected that TTM was due to a biological imbalance.

Thus began a decade of studying our disorder down every path I could find. I have spent many nights at the Biomedical library on the U of M campus researching TTM. I have degrees in Nutriceuticals (the use of plants, herbs and foods as medicine) and Holistic Nutrition (which treats the whole body, rather than just the symptoms, through nutrition) which helped me to research better, but everything I tried internally only offered slight improvements with my TTM and for short periods of time.

I took my studies right down to the cellular level and was studying the cyclic-AMP and electron exchange systems when I just plain gave up. It was too much. Nothing was making sense with it anymore. I put all my books away and tried to adapt to being a Pulling Lifer. None of the herbs or vitamins or meds worked.

Last March of 2000 my pulling got worse. Much, much worse. This went on every day for four months and I was reduced to wearing my hair only two ways to hide all the bald patches. (Ponytail and pulled back in a barrette.) There was hair in the car, on the floor by the couch, by the bed, by the phone, wound onto the vacuum cleaner's spinning bar, caught in the mops and clumped onto clothes in the dryer. Where wasn't there hair? My attitude about having TTM was at an all time low. Then it happened.

I was cleaning out the drawers of my desk when I ran across some of my trich notes from my various studies over the years. I was going to throw them out, but I scanned through them first to see if there was anything worth keeping. One the very last page there was one sentence that caught my eye. It read: If a hair in a group of hairs is pulled out root first It becomes positively charged, tip first, negatively charged. Now, hair is known to give up electron easily, so it's relatively easy to create a positive charge on hair. (Static electricity makes hair "fly-away", like in dry climates or when you rub a balloon on your head, should the mood strike you. The positive charges repel one another and the hairs stand up to put distance between the positive charges.) That got me thinking and studying again.

I went back to the Biomedical Library for the first time in years. There I found out that skin is naturally negatively charged, but a wound on the skin carries a positive charge. (Could it be that TTM suffers carry a positive charge on their active pulling sites, similar to wound sites?) I then began studying the basics of electricity and atomic charges to better understand what was happening. In a nutshell, if you pull a hair from the root (close to the skin), electrons jump off of that hair onto the surrounding hair and skin, thus the pulled hair becomes positively charged (it now has more protons than electrons). This means that it's possible that the surrounding area could be looking for more electrons in order to become negatively charged (more electrons than protons).

So what would happen if I found a way to give the active pulling area of my scalp a small stream of electrons? Would that curb the urge to pull? How can I safely do this? I'm not about to braid a fork in my existing hair and stick it in a light socket! Well, needless to say, I didn't have to. I found a way to shoot a stream of electrons to my scalp and it worked and it has been working since July 23rd, 2000. Even more exciting is that it is now working for others!

The first person to respond to my email about this was Rhonda Holm. She is also a scalp puller of 18 years. She has now been pull free since Aug. 31st, 2000. She has agreed to work with me on this project. We hope, with your experiences and results, we can expand our positive information about this treatment.

Rhonda and I have contracted a manufacturer to make 250 "No Trichs Trigger" devices. They are small hand-held devices that give a small static charge to the skin it is pointed at. They release a small "zap" to the affected areas and the result has been it curbs the urge to pull in some. I'm not exactly sure why it is working so well for us, and the others we have contacted, but we agreed there needs to be a preliminary study done to see how many respond.

These results show that 86% of the Trigger users reported some degree of reduction in their hair pulling. These results are very outstanding considering the low responses to other methods. But we really need more people to judge if this really is a valid, long-term, high-response method.

*Please keep in mind that these results are just for the first 30 days of using the No Trichs Trigger. There have been relapses reported after the 30 day period passed. We are finding out that overuse can make users build up a tolerance to the Trigger and some, including myself, have had to discontinue using the Trigger for 90 days and then started using it again much more sparingly. Those who relapsed and then waited and started over using the Trigger more sparingly have had mixed results.

Disclaimer: This Novelty Product is not a medical device. No health or medical claims are expressed or implied. The No Trichs Trigger is for experimental use only. Not to be used on the eyes, by people wearing pace-makers, people with seizure related disorders or pregnant women.