Categoría: Hair transplant

The art of hair transplant

Hair transplant or hair restoration is not only a surgical procedure that requires skills, knowledge of physiology, anatomy and techniques for its performance, but also a feeling of belonging to the profession, assessment of the patient’s expectations and great artistic sense on the part of the specialist to reproduce exactly what nature gave us and was lost over time.

Few doctors can create a design according to individual characteristics in a patient, respecting harmony, symmetry and, above all, creating natural results with the most advanced techniques. Just as an artist gives time, dedication and effort to create his work, the same happens in professionals dedicated to hair restoration, because not only the patient places expectations, dreams and appearance in our hands, but also trust, being the most important, and for this reason, our work must be assumed with all the seriousness that it implies: changing the life of a patient.

Unfortunately, in this long path of medical practice, we have seen how some patients have been victims of bad surgical techniques or little artistic sensitivity in the designs, where the characteristics of the hair, the patient’s biotype, age or age have not been respected or the feasibility of a transplant.

In René Rodríguez MD, reconstructions by previous implants done by other doctors, are frequent, and in some patients, several of these procedures not only did not yield good results, but also deteriorated their quality of life, making them look unnatural, “rare”, self-conscious because they left scars, caused a distortion of the direction and loss of the angle of natural origin of the hair.

Cosmetic surgery is a field in constant movement, updating and new discoveries. Hair transplantation has advanced in the last 10 years in an impressive way, improving surgical techniques such as the FUE method (Follicular Unit Extraction) that in the right hands offers a number of advantages over older and more invasive techniques, that leave a scar and a longer recovery. This new technique is combined with Capillary Biostimulation, enhancing the beneficial effects of this product on the hair follicle, improving healing and increasing the rate of hair growth, among others.

In Colombia there are few specialist doctors who master this technique at the service of capillary restoration and for this reason, we get consultations from patients with unsuccessful work, carried out by poorly trained hands or poor aesthetic sense and above all, unaware of the body architecture and capillary.

To carry out this work you not only have to have skill, but also love what you do and be an artist on the technique.

World specialists in hair transplantation such as Dr. Bessam Farjo, in his publication in the ISHRS of March 31, 2015, quotes: “The purpose of hair transplantation is to restore the aesthetic balance that is lost with baldness. If hair loss is limited to one area of the scalp, the aesthetic balance of a person’s face is thrown out of balance. Hair restoration recovers the appearance of the patient, so it is very important that hair restoration surgeons combine science with art to obtain the best possible result with each patient”.

I know you by your hair

Being a child of about 5 years old, I was walking with my mother in a store when after a few seconds I realized that the woman who was holding my hand was not my mother. Perhaps in a moment of distraction I confused her beautiful hair with the no less attractive of my mother, and assumed it was her, holding her hand. I let go of the stranger’s hand and ran in search of my mother who was looking at me from a distance with a laugh when she saw my reaction after that childish mistake.

There is a statement that is often correct: “Everything enters through the eyes”

Hair is one of the physical characteristics that most impacts others or at least the characteristic that we most easily remember with a single glance.

Hair care

I can say with certainty that even if we do not know the name of a person that we distinguish when referring to her, we say: the blonde or the one with black hair or the redhead as the case may be, even if we do not even remember the color of her eyes, or her appearance, or her nose.

From a distance, hair is one of the human characteristics that allows us to identify a person.

If we were all bald, it would be very difficult to recognize us from afar. It would also be difficult to focus with a single glance towards the face, since the hair is the visual limit between the face and the rest of the head. This last factor will be recovered with a hair transplant.

Hair is our own trait, to which we can print our personal touch by cutting it the way we want and giving it the color we prefer. Therefore, hair care is something that we should not ignore.

Androgenetic alopecia, or inherited baldness, is a condition that generates progressive thinning of the hair follicles, for which there is still no definitive cure. However, detecting and treating it early can improve the prognosis.

Patients with androgenetic alopecia treated early may have better results and keep their hair for longer than those who start treatment late.

Before any indication of hair loss, it is better to go to a dermatologist specialized in hair restoration to start the most appropriate treatment in order to care for it and maintain such a distinctive feature in human beings, as the hair.

Female Alopecia

Hair loss in women is an increasingly frequent health problem in medical consultations and in our clinic it represents 40% of all cases.

Although it is a condition that affects both sexes, historically male alopecia is more socially accepted.

Female alopecia affects self-esteem and interpersonal relationships, leading them to suffer different cases of depression and isolation, because their hair is part not only of a stereotype of beauty, of health, but also plays a very important role as an element of communication and weapon of seduction.

Far from resigning themselves and living this martyrdom in silence, many women in their despair end up looking for little serious alternatives, risky for their health, without scientific support and with no results.

These products are offered through mass media such as internet, television, radio and in beauty salons, they always promise miraculous results in their advertising campaigns and these always go hand in hand with a final disappointment and frustration about the effectiveness of the product assumed by your buyers.

The best decision is to deal with hair loss in women by looking for an expert on the subject, such is the case of trichologists, a branch of dermatology specializing in hair.

There are various diseases that can cause hair loss in women, and depending on these, the correct treatment will be chosen.

The first step to solve the problem of hair loss is to consult a specialist to find out the cause.

We invite you to request your appointment with one of our experts.

Platelet rich plasma, an excellent alternative to restore hair

Life itself seeks by all means, to develop mechanisms that guarantee its survival.

Living organisms have developed multiple processes to counteract, minimize and even repair the effects caused by internal and external aggressors. The human being is no exception.

The Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini with the American biochemist Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of growth factors in human cells. Within these cells it is important to highlight platelets. Platelets are known to be the smallest cells in our blood. Platelets contain alpha granules that store a large number of these factors that, when released, stimulate cell regeneration and multiplication in addition to generating new networks of blood vessels.

Platelets are responsible for stimulating the initial repair of tissues when these are damaged by injuries such as wounds, burns and others. By breaking down platelets and releasing growth factors, many cells migrate to the affected area, regenerating destroyed tissues, preventing infection, and producing new blood vessels to nourish newly repaired tissues.

Taking these factors into account, for several decades, various branches of medicine have applied biostimulation with platelet growth factors as a means to accelerate recovery in different types of injuries.

Platelets have also been very useful for treating baldness. (See cases)

Hair is a cyclical organ that presents phases of growth, rest and fall. The capillary biostimulation with platelet growth factors, manages to shorten the hair loss phase, stimulating the hair follicles to enter and stay in the growth phase.

This promotes the development of thicker and better quality hair. It also slows down the active fall, reducing it by 50% after two weeks and close to 100% one month after being applied.

The procedure takes approximately 40 minutes. This is done by taking a sample of the patient’s own blood, which is processed in minutes in order to to obtain a concentrate with platelets that is then injected into the patient’s scalp.

A great advantage of this procedure is that as it is a product from the same patient, it does not present rejections or adverse reactions, it is performed by a trichologist dermatologist, it is an outpatient procedure and does not generate disability.

Biostimulation with platelet growth factors is an excellent alternative for the treatment of female alopecia, to complement the treatment of patients who have a contraindication to taking finasteride or applying minoxidil or simply as a complement to hair restoration treatments.

Hair graft with the FUE method to avoid baldness

Hair transplant using motorized FUE

I want to share with you some notes from Dr. Bertrem Ng., on what a patient should expect from a hair transplant professional, and, from the FUE with ethics and values of the service.

(Below the credits of the publication)

The Guinea Pig

The learning curve to run a FUE procedure is very long. The technique can only be perfected through constant practice on patients. Some centers offer incredibly low fees to attract patients. The questions remain:

1. Is it ethical to perform surgery on a patient for the sole purpose of personal gain (to practice FUE)?

2. Is the patient informed that the physician lacks the experience required for best result?

1. Is it ethical to perform surgery on a patient for the sole purpose of personal gain (to practice FUE)?

2. Is the patient informed that the physician lacks the experience required for best result?

To summarize, automated FUE systems are just one tool used for grafting. Good results also depend on careful patient selection, implantation line design, graft survival, incisions and seeding, post-operative care, adjunctive therapy, etc. The method should not be marketed as a secret weapon of success to attract buyers. This must be supported by appropriate training, experience gained on patients, and professional support. Otherwise it would be like selling a gun to a child. The donor area is limited and should never be wasted. Primum non nocere …

International Hair Transplant Forum January / February 2012
www.ISHRS.org

Editor’s Note: The questions and comments posed by Dr. Ng are very pertinent. Considering the handling of patients as “guinea pigs”.it is a fact that for the training of each physician there is a learning curve that will inevitably be practiced on patients to some extent. Lying about experience is unethical, practicing on patients is not necessarily unethical if the surgeon has been properly trained in all steps of the procedure, not just in the use of the “automated machine.” I believe that telling the patient that you cannot get the best result due to your relative lack of experience is unrealistic, since no one would then be able to develop the practice if it were not done in this way. It is the physician’s obligation to properly learn the technique and be honest with the patient about his training and experience. Offering a discount during the “learning curve” is unethical in my opinion. Considering the sales techniques for automated grafting machines, it is well known that these suction assisted devices have been on the market for about 20 years. The reason why companies frequently seek novice and inexperienced doctors is because the use of these machines is practically non-existent by experienced hair transplant surgeons, who do not see the cost-benefit ratio as favorable due to the high cost of these devices. Dr. Ng’s comments on using the machine with just one day of training are well received. – RRMD

How much does a hair transplant cost?

Every time one thinks of having any type of aesthetic procedure, and even more so, a hair transplant, a series of questions arise such as: With whom should I do it? How painful? How long will I be incapacitated? What will the result be like? And above all, how much is it going to cost me?

This last question can have many implications. If you want to access a quality service, using state-of-the-art technology and with a doctor who has a good reputation and is trained, you are guaranteeing that your result will be the best and this comes with a price.

A hair transplant is a surgical procedure where the hair on the head is redistributed, taking hair follicles from the back where there are more, to the bald areas, to recover the hair. To carry out this surgery, you must have a team of trained people who have the necessary expertise and experience, so that your hair follicles are treated with care and gentleness.

When a patient has hair loss and is receding, or has depopulated crown, or worse, an advanced degree of baldness and chooses to undergo a hair transplant, at least 1,500 – 3,000 follicular units should be seeded so they look good. The more grafts to recover the hair, the better the result will be and the more coverage the bald area will have. For a session of this magnitude, it is impossible for a doctor to do this work alone. This is a procedure that is meticulous, thorough, and requires great precision. If only one person did it, they could not do more than 500 grafts per day and this would make the surgery inefficient.

In addition, regarding the medical equipment, appropriate instruments are required to perform the transplant. Either with the FUE method or with the strip method, instruments designed to manipulate the follicles without damaging them are required, such as forceps, micro-scalpels, magnifying glasses, prisms and microscopes since the follicles are very small and have delicate structures. Hair transplantation is a growing field where the instruments used should be innovative and adequate to perform the procedure.

Taking into account all the above, it can be seen that a well-done hair transplant is a surgery that has its price. Cheap surgeries are performed without the proper instruments and possibly use a medical team that does not have sufficient expertise. It should be noted that to perform a hair transplant and gain hair, the medical team must be exclusively dedicated to performing this procedure all the time. If the team occasionally performs this type of surgery, it will not be able to develop the expertise required.

Patients have come to our center who have undergone hair transplants in other clinics and who have been requesting a new session with us. We asked them the cost of their surgery and the number of grafts they paid for. Here are some examples:

As you can see, the number of grafts that were seeded to these patients does not match reality. In most cases there are between 300 – 500 mini grafts. A mini graft is a 2-4mm piece of skin that contains 3 or more hair follicles. This type of graft was used until the nineties, this is the classic “doll hair”. Since then, only follicular units that can contain 1-4 hairs have been used and it is the natural way in which the hair is organized when growing from the scalp.

Before thinking about the price of your hair transplant, we advise taking into account the following recommendations:

Find a doctor who is dedicated to hair restoration full time
Ask the doctor to show you his own surgery cases
What techniques does he offer: FUE method or strip.
Ask your doctor how he counts the grafts.
Ask him what kind of instruments he uses.
Find out from his medical team how long they have been working with him.
Ask your doctor for the certificates of attendance at conferences (mainly from the ISHRS).
Ask for his experience in the field
Verify that the clinic is authorized by the Ministry of Health.

As doctors, we take an oath at the end of our studies where one of its first precepts is to DO NO HARM.

Currently there are techniques, instruments and technology available to perform hair transplants with completely natural results and with the FUE method the donor area is left without any trace. Therefore, it is outrageous to see the suffering of patients who are more affected by the result of their hair transplant than by the baldness itself. Hopefully, this is not going to be your case …