Alopecia Awareness

Joey Logano [00:00:04]:
I always think that the first move is to call your family doctor, the doctor that you trust and that knows you and knows your family history. Go to that person first and they may send you to a specialist after that. And I would probably do that. And then after that, go look for what the best solution is for you.

Kevin Rolston [00:00:37]:
Welcome to Hairpod, the podcast where you get to hear real people talk about their hair journeys. I’m your host, Kevin Ralston, and each week I get to interview people from different walks of life whose lives have been touched by hair loss in some form or fashion. Many of our guests have experienced hair loss themselves and found a way to get their confidence and their hair back. This week, we’re bringing you a story about alopecia areata in honor of Alopecia Awareness Month. Alopecia areata is an autoimmune condition that causes hair loss. It usually occurs as a round patch or patches of hair loss on the scalp, but it can affect hair on any part of the body. While the condition doesn’t cause any physical pain, losing your hair can have a significant emotional impact. It is estimated that about 2% of the worlds population has alopecia areata or will develop it at some point, which is why we want to raise awareness and shed light on this issue.

Kevin Rolston [00:01:36]:
And who better to talk about it with us than NASCAR champion Joey Logano? Hes back again on the podcast to speak about his experience with alopecia areata. Joey was diagnosed with alopecia after a routine haircut revealed a few bald patches on the back of his head. Now he uses his platform to speak openly about his experience with hair loss in hopes that he can help others going through it. Today, he’s going to take us all the way back to the beginning before his diagnosis, back to the moment when he first discovered his hair loss.

Joey Logano [00:02:12]:
It was definitely your first thing. You realize what’s going on? You’re like, huh? What is this? How dangerous is it? Am I what’s going on? For me, I just got a haircut and I got back home and my wife thought that the hairdresser just completely screwed up my haircut, is what she thought because there’s like spots all over the back of my head. Wow. Completely butchered your hair. And I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Kevin Rolston [00:02:39]:
Wow. So you couldn’t see it yourself. It was in a place where you couldn’t even notice.

Joey Logano [00:02:43]:
It was a little longer at the time. So when I got a haircut, it really exposed, and then the spots kept kind of growing, you know, and then you kind of. You know, at that point, your first thing you do is call your doctor and say, hey, what’s going on? I went to the doctor, my family doctor, like, okay, we think we have alopecia. I’m like, all right, so what do I do? What is it about? And it’s an autoimmune disorder that, honestly, nobody really understands. From what I’ve learned about it, no one really knows where it comes from, how you got it, hereditary stress. It could be. There’s a lot of different things that can really.

Kevin Rolston [00:03:13]:
Okay. Wow.

Joey Logano [00:03:14]:
Yeah. And it’s different for everybody. Everyone’s got different things. It seems like some people lose all their hair sometimes. It’s all the time. Sometimes just a little bit here and there, which I just get flare ups every now and again. And. Yeah, so there are some different remedies that.

Joey Logano [00:03:26]:
That I looked into. I talked to a few friends that had a similar experience, and then, you know, eventually, you know, hooking up with hair club, that was the best fix. It was really the easiest fix.

Kevin Rolston [00:03:37]:
Yeah.

Joey Logano [00:03:37]:
And I don’t have to go through all the needles and stuff that they’re wanting to put in my head. I was like, hang on a second. Before you start injecting stuff into my. Into my skull here, I want to make sure we’re doing the right thing here. So hair club was definitely the correct fit for me. It’s worked out well.

Kevin Rolston [00:03:54]:
So with what you do for your.

Kevin Rolston [00:03:55]:
Solution that you got with hair club, does it present a problem when you’re traveling so much? Do you have to pack up a lot of stuff with you? Does it affect your routine at all, or is it pretty serious?

Joey Logano [00:04:05]:
Not really to be asked what you. I mean, once you get the system going or you kind of understand how things work, you get your routine, then it’s really smooth. It takes a couple months to figure out, okay, what works for me. How do I do this? And then over time, it’s like second nature, right. And get your hair cut once a month just like everybody else. Right. Like, it really isn’t that different, which is great. It’s worked out really smooth.

Joey Logano [00:04:29]:
And, you know, I still get the flare ups every now and again, but honestly, you can’t even tell. You don’t even know. It’s pretty impressive.

Kevin Rolston [00:04:35]:
Now, you talk about how you just after one haircut, your wife noticed that you had the spots. Tell me a little bit about how big the spots were, and it sounds like you found the diagnosis pretty quick. Did you google it? Did you already know about alopecia. How are you so fast to find out? What was the cause of your hair loss issues?

Joey Logano [00:04:54]:
Well, I mean, like I said, I called my doctor first. That was the first thing I did because I didn’t know. I didn’t know what it was. But, you know, just kind of looking at, there’s probably, I don’t know, ten or twelve small spots, you know, yay. Biggest, you know, maybe a half. Some were a half inch. Some were an inch, inch and a half big somewhere were pretty big, and they would kind of grow for a little bit. And it just.

Joey Logano [00:05:14]:
It’s just bald. It’s kind of. It’s interesting. There’s no hair, and then it grows back gray, and then eventually your color comes back. Yeah. So it’s just kind of a. That’s the, like you said, it’s different for everybody, right? I mean, I feel like I’m pretty lucky for this scenario. I have some people, you know, they lose their.

Joey Logano [00:05:33]:
Their eyebrows and you full, like, all your body hair, you know, hair in your arms, whatever. Whatever it may be. Yeah. But that’s, um. Doesn’t seem like that’s what I have, which is, you know, which is good. But like I said, the cool thing is there’s. We live in a day and age that it’s not that big of a deal, right? Like, I mean, it is, but there’s a. At least there’s a fix, right? And then you don’t have that.

Joey Logano [00:05:56]:
You think 20 something years ago there is no answer for it. And then you got to answer questions and people look at you funny. What’s going on? You know, you got to answer awkward questions, you know, where people just stare at you and you’re scared to ask a question, but, you know, it’s a distraction in the room. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t a big fan of that part of it. Like, I didn’t mind having it, and I didn’t mind someone asking me a question. I just don’t like people staring at me. Like, I turn around, like, what.

Kevin Rolston [00:06:24]:
They were looking. You just feel the eyes on you and looking at those.

Kevin Rolston [00:06:28]:
Yeah.

Joey Logano [00:06:28]:
You catch up, you know, you turn and be like, hey, I saw you.

Kevin Rolston [00:06:31]:
I got you. So how long did you go with having signs of alopecia before you found your solution to cover it up? Cause I assume now anytime you see Joey Logano, you’re not gonna be able to tell that you have any flare ups with alopecia.

Joey Logano [00:06:46]:
Yeah, I don’t think. You’ll probably, probably never know from now on. But, you know, I went probably, I don’t know, it was probably five months or so before I started to. I wanted to see everything that was out there first and understand, okay, what’s, what’s my options, what’s my risks, you know, and how do I want to handle it? Because for me, it’s, and this is kind of for everybody, right? Like, it’s a big adjustment in your lifestyle, right, doing something about it, but also, it’s a big appearance change for people, right. It’s kind of like a, oh, what happened to you, right? Like, so there’s kind of a, how do you want to handle it? How do you want to play that out? You kind of got to think through that stuff a little bit. But eventually I realized that it was kind of a no brainer thing to do. I wanted to do something, and I understood that. There is going to be some people making comments.

Joey Logano [00:07:39]:
The majority of them, almost all of them are positive. You got to know, for me, I’m a professional athlete, so not everybody loves me. There’s people that root for you, and there’s people that don’t root for you. So the people that don’t root for you are always going to have something to say, right? The people that knew me best, or even the people I didn’t know, they all think it’s great. And now I don’t think anyone thinks about it or realizes it, right? It’s just a normal thing now. It’s just how I look.

Kevin Rolston [00:08:10]:
Joey’s experience with alopecia while being in the public eye is a powerful testament to his confidence. While there is no cure for alopecia, Joey points out that there are things that can be done so that people with his condition can look and feel the way they want to. Joey found something that works for him, and now no one really ever thinks twice about his hair loss. They just see Joey as he is today. And because he was never shy about it, his transformation sparked curiosity among his friends and coworkers. People started to reach out, eager to find out how he managed to get his hair back.

Joey Logano [00:08:48]:
Oh, I got a lot of phone calls afterwards, like, hey, what’d you do? What? How do I do that? What’s. Like, what’s going on? Like, I got my phone ran off the hook there for a little bit, especially when I first got my hair. So it’s definitely, you know, it’s a. It, it gets everyone’s attention, but you’d be amazed how many people want to do something about it. Like, it was, I mean, literally 50 something text messages. You know, the day I just said, here’s what I did and is amazing how many people are like, oh, I want to do that. How do I do that? Where do I go? And, yeah, that just, that, to me, proved the point that somebody needed to be more open and talk about it and go out in the public and just accept what it was. Right.

Joey Logano [00:09:29]:
What I was dealing with. And that, yeah, I did something about it. You know what? And I’m happy I did. You know, and a lot of other people do, too.

Kevin Rolston [00:09:36]:
Now, for alopecia awareness month, there are a couple things that I’m curious about. First of all, do you have anyone else in your family that has alopecia?

Joey Logano [00:09:43]:
Not that I know of. And a lot of times, from what I’ve learned, this lives in your system for years, right? Like, it’s something you. It seems to be, from what I understand, maybe it’s hereditary. They don’t completely understand it, but there’s things that can trigger it. Right. So it’s there the whole time. And the way I look at it is, listen, if this is my autoimmune disorder and this is all it is, right. And I can fix it.

Kevin Rolston [00:10:08]:
Yeah.

Joey Logano [00:10:09]:
I feel like I got away with one. You did?

Kevin Rolston [00:10:11]:
Yeah. All the things you could have.

Joey Logano [00:10:14]:
Yeah, exactly. Like I said, because there’s a fix for it. But I understand that it’s also, you got to think, too, for. I think for a woman, you know, for women, that’s definitely a little bit more challenging than it is for men. You know, it’s. Because it’s just different. Any way you look at it, it’s just different for girls. But there’s fixes for that, too.

Joey Logano [00:10:32]:
Right? So that’s the good part. But it is an interesting experience when it first happens and you get, you get a little nervous, for sure, because you’re like, well, what’s the. What else can happen and how bad can it get? And you don’t really know. It was crazy. Every doctor I went to, they’re just like, we don’t really know. But, you know, we think if we do this for a little bit and, you know, you can give you some steroid injections into your, you know, your scalp and all this stuff. And I was like, hey, hang on a second. Like, right? I.

Joey Logano [00:10:59]:
I don’t know how far I wanna go with something like that. And it’s different for everybody.

Kevin Rolston [00:11:03]:
What about the ages that alopecia hits? Does it pick on a certain age or can kids get alopecia?

Joey Logano [00:11:10]:
Oh, kids, yeah. Kids can definitely get it. And that’s one of the cool things that hair club does is that they will, they work a lot with children, and as you know, not all kids are as well polished as adults are when it comes to being polite. And kids can sometimes just, they can just be nasty. Right. They don’t know better. Right. So you can’t get mad at them.

Joey Logano [00:11:31]:
They don’t know better. But put yourself in a, you know, eight or nine year old kid’s shoes, going to school with a bunch of spots on the back of your head or worse. Right.

Kevin Rolston [00:11:41]:
That’s tough, boy.

Joey Logano [00:11:43]:
That’s hard. Right. I can do that as a, as a full grown man, but, and know how to handle it correctly, but to put a kid in that situation, that’s hard. Yeah. And it’s cool. Haircut does that with cancer patients and kids and all that. Yeah. Donate a lot of hair.

Joey Logano [00:11:58]:
I think that’s one of the greatest things they do.

Kevin Rolston [00:12:00]:
Do you have any advice for anybody that is right at the beginning stages of saying, maybe I have alopecia? You contacted your doctor. Is that the best first move or what is the right process to figure out, do you actually have alopecia? And then how can you best treat it?

Joey Logano [00:12:18]:
Doctor Justin I always think that the first move is to call your family doctor, the doctor that you trust and that knows you and knows your family history. Go to that person first and they may send you to a specialist after that. And I would probably do that. And then after that, you know, go look for what the best solution is for you.

Kevin Rolston [00:12:42]:
As we wrap up today’s interview, we want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Joey Logano for taking the time out of his busy racing schedule to speak with us. When people like Joey have the confidence to speak openly about conditions like this, it helps to break down the stigma surrounding hair loss, showing that its not something to be ashamed of. It also helps to educate others who might not otherwise know how to react when they see someone with alopecia areata. To anyone out there living with alopecia, remember that you are not alone. Your journey is unique. And with the right support and community, you can face it with the same strength and resilience as Joey does. For more inspirational stories and words of wisdom from people who have been through hair loss, make sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening to another episode of Hairpod.

Kevin Rolston [00:13:32]:
Check us out at Hair Club on Instagram or search Hairpod on Facebook to continue the conversation. If you know someone who could benefit from hearing this episode. We would love it if you would share it with them. If youre enjoying the show, consider leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. We also have a website. Check it out by going to podcast Dot hairclub.com. were here to build people up and share real stories so people experiencing hair loss feel a little bit less alone. And when you share, review and subscribe, it helps us do just that.

Kevin Rolston [00:14:06]:
So thank you. Until next time.