What causes excessive hair growth in women and how is it treated?

If you're a woman and you've got too much hair, that represents, for many individuals, a really uncomfortable body image problem. It may be facial, it may be on the rest of the body, and it'll be an androgen-dependent, or testosterone-dependent areas. Cosmetic treatments work, laser treatment works, but if there's too much testosterone in the system that excess hair is going to keep coming back. And then we want to start turning our attention to actually seeing if we can control the hormonal aspects. There are ways of doing it. There are no perfect treatments here, but there are a lot of satisfied customers. We can use two main ways of reducing the testosterone. The first one is to use a form of oral contraceptive pill that actually does two things. Firstly, it makes the testosterone less active, it binds it up. And the second thing it does is it blocks the effect of testosterone, male hormone, on the hair follicle. And those treatments are the first and mainstay therapy. Moving on from that, some women have really bad excess hair, and then we start to consider other anti-testosterone treatments that are used in a variety of different circumstances, and which can then be used in addition to those initial treatments.