Over the past almost 20 years of performing thousands of hair transplants, I have come to appreciate the challenges of achieving natural appearing results, for which there is no “technologic” substitute to the artistic ability and proper planting steps of the surgeon and his team.
Several automated hair transplant deviceshave been introduced in the past few years by different manufacturers, in partdesigned to make it easier for inexperienced doctors to start performing hair transplants, and in other cases to help doctors who lack trained assistants critical for graft dissection and/or planting to overcome the hurdleofassembling such a team. What these proprietary deviceshave in common is that they perform the removal of hair grafts through the same technique – follicular unit extraction (FUE) – which removes the grafts one by one using tiny punches. This makes FUEan excellentalternative to the follicular grafting (FUG) technique, which obtains the grafts from a single donor site strip.
The FUE technique, which I have been regularly performing since 2009, has rapidly grown in popularity due to itsprimary advantage that it avoids altogether a linear donor site incision scar. Not only does this sound less invasive to patients, it also permits most patients to cut their hair very short or even shave their heads completely without a visible linear donor site scar. This aspect of FUE is of tremendous appeal to many prospective patients and contributes to the increased demand for the procedure – a demand that these proprietary devices are designed to meet.
Question:
Hi Dr. Epstein.
I heared that some candidates are not suitable for transplantation because of not having very good donner site area.
In such case can few donner hairs combined with body hairs???
can we use the combination of both to achieve a fuller looks???
Answer:
Yes Rahul, sometimes patients do not have a very good donor supply, in which case body hairs can be obtained by the FUE technique to supplement the coverage. These body hairs are less reliable for transplanting, but can in some patients be quite good- especially when they come from the beard and sometimes the chest. Additional scalp hairs can typically be obtained in addition to those from the strip by doing the FUE technique at the same or subsequent procedure.Posted by Jeffrey Epstein, MD, FACS
I am still very much interested in having Dr Epstein do some work on my hair. Dr Epstein was kind enough to give me an estimate of # of grafts and price after I sent in photos, suggesting something around 2,000 follicular unit micrografts. But the update: I went to see Dr. XXX in NYC. He did my last transplant in 2001. He examined my head and thought I had lots of good donor areas left. He suggested 400 micrografts to fill in what I have. So. Since I love the job that Dr Epstein did for my brother, I am still inclined to come down to Miami!