akk's Hair Loss Story
I had been having hairloss since I was in college ( around 20 yrs old) and I thought the main reason could be changes to my diet or lack of nutrituion or something and never looked into the option of visiting a dermatologist to evaluate my situation. It worsened as years progressed and so did my confidence level. By the time I was 27 years old, I had very visible scalp with lot of gaps. I looked lot older than my age at the time and I was trying to avoid any social gatherings and meeting with friends and I heard comments about my hair loss in every discussion that I need to do something about it.
So in 2000 I decided to go for first hair transplant and went to Bosley medical center in Philadelphia. During my first procedure I got about 800 grafts through FUT technique. And being naive, I thought that it would be the permanent fix and I will have decent coverage. As years passed by I had rest of the non-transplanted hair beginning to fall.
In 2005, I met Dr.Ramachandran in Chennai who is a hair transplant surgeon and wanted to know if I can get a procedure. He recommended me to wait a year or two so that I would have the max hair fall of all my non-transplanted hair and we could do a much better transplant. But 2 years became 7 years and I had a baby, shifting jobs, cities..etc..and in 2011, I started on my 2nd hair transplant crusade.
I did a lot of research this time as the cost of hair transplant had fallen significantly over the years and the number of doctors providing these services had increased significantly. This was a good news, however, trying to find the right surgeon was my number one goal with cost following closely second. I visitied few doctors in US that was recommended in this site, like Dr. Cooley, and got more ideas of the techniques they use to provide the best results. Now again the cost of a 2000+ hair graft transplant was in the north of 8K+ and I was willing to spend more time to see other qualified doctors who could provide the same for lower cost.
Since I visit India frequently, I decided to see any qualified doctors in India recommended by this community and I came across, Dr. Madhu's and Dr. Radha's profile. So I turned my attention to doing more research through all my contacts and friends who live in those respective cities. DR. Radha was recommeded by many, surprisingly, even though she only had a short tenure in this area. The major issue on Dr. Madhu's side was that he has now made it too commercialized that he does 2-3 transplants a day and he does not do it himself. He hires junior docotrs to do the procedure. He is making it like more of Ford Assembly plant.
I'm of the strong opiniion that extracting grafts and replacing it in recepient area is not the actual skill, the skill that is required is more of artistic work that gives a natural hair line, based on your facial feature, the depth of baldness etc. Then accidently, I ran into a good friend of mine who is an opthamalogist in Bangalore and he told me that got a transplant done from Dr.Ramachandran in Chennai. And his hair line looked very natural. So I decided to visit Dr. Ramachandran at this clinic and had 3 vistis in total to understand what he does and even talked to some of the patients who went through the procedure. I was convinced that he was very qualified and the results were impressive. So I took the plunge and decided to get the transplant on Sep 3rd 2012.
Now the most impressive part was that the doctor explained the whole process that he said that having a combination of FUE and FUT yield the best results than just having FUT. I was really surprised that he even mentioned FUE as most of the doctors perform FUT than FUE. And after sitting through the procedure, if anyone tells you that FUE is subpar than FUT, THEY ARE LYING. Actually FUE yeids much better quality hairs than the traditional strip method. The reason most of doctors dont do FUE is because its very time consuming and it requires the doctor be with you all the time. Dr. Ramachandran performed the procedure for 6 hours (non-stop) and when he showed me the quality of FUE hair and the yeild (this is something again FUT specialits will never divulge) was very impressive. 10 hours later after the procedure, I'm feeling fine and now the waiting game of the growth...the journey begins...i will upload my video and pictures for all to see.
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