Hair Transplant Pros & Cons

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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
Depending on a number of critically important
factors, hair transplant surgery can either be
one of the best decisions you will ever make or
among the worst. Today we're going to discuss the
pros and cons of surgical hair restoration,
euphemistically called hair plugs or
transplantation. In fact, the more accurate
description is "auto logous hair bearing skin
transplantation". This is because the actual
procedure involves harvesting sections of skin
from a hairy part of one's scalp (donor) and
moving it to a bald area (recipient) of the same
person. Skin transplantation between anyone other
than genetically-identical twins does not work.
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
The technique of moving hair bearing skin tissue
grafts from one part of the scalp to another
dates back at least 50 years. In the 1950's a
pioneering surgeon by the name of Dr. Norman
Orentreich began to experiment with the idea on
willing patients. Orentreich's groundbreaking
work demonstrated a concept that became known as
donor dependence, or donor identity, that is to
say that hair bearing skin grafts harvested from
the zone of the scalp outside the pattern of loss
continued to produce viable hair even though the
grafts had been relocated into areas that had
previously gone bald.
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
During the next two decades hair transplantation
gradually evolved from a curiosity into a popular
cosmetic procedure, primarily among balding men
of late middle years. In the 1960's and 1970's
practitioners including Dr. Emanuel Merritt in
Colorado, Dr. Otar Norwood, Dr. Walter Unger
showed that hair restoration could be feasible
and cost effective. A standard of care was
developed that, in experienced hands, allowed for
reasonably consistent results. At the time the
most common technique involved the use of
relatively large grafts (4mm -- 5mm in diameter)
that were removed individually from the donor
site by round punches. This tended to leave the
occipital scalp resembling a field of Swiss
cheese and significantly limited the yield that
was available for movement to the bald zones on
top and in front of the patient's scalp.
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
Over the course of multiple surgical sessions,
grafts were placed into defects that had been
created in the recipient zone (bald area) using
slightly smaller punch tools. After healing the
patient returned for follow up sessions where
grafts were placed in and amongst the previous
transplants. Because of the relative crudity of
this technique, results were often quite apparent
and the patient was left to walk around with a
dolls hair like appearance, particularly
noticeable at the frontal hair line, and
especially on windy days. Such patients were
usually quite limited in the manner they could
style their hair and, because of the wasteful
donor extraction method, many persons ran out of
donor hair long before the process could be
completed.
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
In the 1980's hair restoration surgery gradually
began to evolve from the use of larger punch
grafts to smaller and smaller mini and
micrografts. Minigrafts were used behind the hair
line, while one and two hair micrografts were
used to approximate a natural transition from
forehead to hair. Donor site management also
evolved from round punch extraction to strip
harvesting --- a far more efficient technique.
Pioneers in this area were skilled surgical
practitioners such as Dr. Dan Didocha, Dr. Martin
Tessler, Dr. Robert Bernstein and others. The
concept of creating a more natural appearance
evolved still further in the 1990's with the
advent of follicular unit extraction (FUE), first
proposed by the highly gifted Dr. Robert
Bernstein, and described in the 1995 Bernstein
and Rassman publication "Follicular
Transplantation.
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Hair Transplant Pros Cons
Thank You For Reading !!!