This is truly a traumatic subject for most men who discover that they are, in fact, balding. Why? Well look around. Everywhere you go–grocery stores, shopping malls, movies, and football games–you can’t find balding men with hair loss en vogue. No. Guys everywhere are living a sort of hell on earth trying to live up to the modern-day demands of having it all (staying young, healthy and great-looking). But hair loss is a fact of life for most men. And male pattern baldness accounts for 95 percent of men who are losing their hair. There are a couple of ways that hair loss men can go through diagnosis.

Okay, so define male pattern baldness or MPB. What is it and how do I know that I have it? Well, fortunately it’s not that hard to tell. It’s is usually diagnosed visually, just as a doctor would diagnose that you have a head cold from your physical symptoms of a runny nose, swollen lymph nodes and tonsils and an inflamed throat. Another way you can tell is by looking at your family history. Did your dad or grandfather have MPB? If you have a family history of it and you’re are following the pattern which I will describe below, then you have male pattern balding.

Now you can go to your dermatologist to get checked under the scalp with a magnifier which is technically called a densitometer. It’ll actually assess the degree of the size of your hair follicle to see how much it has shrunk. They’re even advertised clinics where you can have a scalp biopsy to diagnose the cause of your hair loss. However, this hair analysis is only to assess the possibility of poison-induced hair loss which is very, very uncommon. Usually arsenic or lead do NOT lead to hair loss and definitely not to male pattern hair loss.

But you don’t have to wait for an appointment to ascertain whether or not you have MPB. You can see for yourself if your balding is, in fact, MPB by comparing it to the standard Norwood Scale. This is a great tool for accurately diagnosing male pattern baldness, and it will also prevent you from misdiagnosing your hair loss. Basically the Norwood Scale is a collection of diagrams showing the progression of the condition. Initially your hair will recede along the front of the hairline from the temples to the top. Soon you will also realize that another bald spot is showing at the crown of your head. Your hair thinning will continue from both ends working inward until there is just a thin band of hair separating the two sections, and ultimately you will have hair only around the sides and back of your head.