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 …
