uselessgomez

I'd say FUE for the following reasons... Your profile says that you're about 30. You're young and you have time down the road to make the change to strip if you don't experience good transection & yield. You said you have dark wavy hair. Your skin hair contrast is probably decent (can't see any pics though). And some Docs say this is a good thing for FUE (there's still the "mushy" skin x-factor that might come into play though). You are currently experiencing fairly minor hairloss. No one knows how it's going to pan out. Even with the more tried and tested strip procedure there's some unknowns. I think FUE for the numbers you're looking at preserves more options for the future - the option to wear your hair short, option to switch to strip down the road, the option to shave your head and not have a linear scar showing. You wear your hair short. While some people get visible white dots, the scarring from FUE is less noticeable when the hair is short. I've seen some really good trycho closures posted online that allow for a pretty short cut, but MOST of the time I think short haircuts - advantage FUE. There's a lot of posted results, good average & bad, all posted online. Except for some really bad ones where FUE megasessions were involved, FUE leaves a donor area that looks better for short haircuts. I don't remember if you're on medication. I presume that you are. If not, you should be! I'm kind of in the same boat as you. I think FUE is more appropriate FOR ME, but I wouldn't begrudge anyone for going the strip route with similar needs. Especially if you know that the best doctors will straight up tell you that you're not going to get the same results as strip due to the trauma involved with the handling of the grafts during FUE. The results depend a lot on your physiology, which is an unknown until you actually have seen the results. Just my 2 cents. Best of luck whatever way you go.

Why do H&W get to be considered 1 doc instead of 2?

Also to add to this, transection and yield are 2 completely different things. You can have a very low transection but a poor yield. Yield is what kind of growth you experience after it's all said and done. Some people just have poor growth no matter how well the surgery allegedly goes. Why is that? Who knows.

Guys, if you watch the movie "Knocked Up," Steve has a small part in it and he has a clearly receded hairline, which is different from his hair on the Office. I think his hair season 1 of The Office may have been his real hair, but he started wearing a hair piece starting at season 2. It's the only explanation that makes sense.

What's going on with this guy's hair? 1st season of The Office he has a thinning hairline. Then season 2 comes around, he's all thickened up and has perfect hair. Saw the movie "Knocked Up" again the other day where he has a small part, and he's got some temporal recession. He must have some kind of hair system?

I don't think it matters so much who pulls the grafts, whether the surgeon or a tech. The division of labor and specialization of tasks probably makes the procedure better. As long as everything is under the direct supervision of the surgeon, I don't see how it matters. Since the distinction between an FUE surgeon and strip surgeon lay in the extraction process, I would say that a great FUE surgeon is someone who is honest about it's challenges (physics involved with the handling of grafts), who consistently posts their results for everyone to see, who demonstrates low transection & high yield, and who leaves the donor area looking good (i.e., minimizing the tell signs of surgery). The skill and artistry involved with the placement of the grafts should be exactly the same as with strip. And treating patients well and providing good support and communication would be exactly the same as strip, too.

Dr. Harris and Dr. Lindsey are great FUE doctors who have a lot of their results posted online.

Well, with the language about being medicated before the consent information was given, it left open to interpretation that it was deliberately done to get badluck to move forward without him fully being aware of the risks. It's not unreasonable for Dr. Feller to be upset by that and to think it would harm his reputation. I have great respect and admiration for Dr. Feller. I know him to be highly ethical and a good man. But I have followed his work and read his opinions for a long time which made me doubt the veracity of the said claims before they were retracted. But what about those who are newer to this industry and are still forming their opinion of Dr. Feller? They might not give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm not suggesting that Dr. Feller is beyond reproach. No one is. But I know about his long track record of consistency, honesty, openness, fairness, and ethics. To someone new to this industry reading it about this without a formed opinion of Dr. Feller, it CAN hurt his reputation. I think people should be careful about what they say, even when just speaking their mind behind anonymity on a message board. The Dr. can't remain anonymous and half-truths or deliberate lies, even if later retracted, can do harm. I don't mean to come across as insensitive to the OP. I deeply feel for anyone who has received a hair transplant or any cosmetic surgery that didn't produce what they had hoped for. But there's a boundary between when you're just someone expressing dissatisfaction vs leveling injurious claims with no burden of proof. Free speech and no censorship doesn't mean no consequences. And regarding the refund, I see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, a procedure was performed for money and even the Dr. agrees that the result wasn't good. But the effort, time, and resources were already invested by Dr. Feller and he bore a risk, too! To issue a refund would be insisting that Dr. Feller assumes all of the risk and bears all of the cost for an unfortunate occurrence that everyone agrees that badluck didn't do sufficient research for. Dr. Feller bearing this cost means he passes it along to his other patients in the form of higher prices. Which means that people who DO plenty of research spending the time to get educated will be paying more so money can be refunded to those who don't. Cosmetic surgery is a luxury. And it's not something surgeons do just out of charity, they do it for profit. I really hope that this can be resolved before it goes into court and ends up costing more money the actual procedure itself. It sucks and I know most of us here reading this just wish that it wouldn't have happened.

Dr. Feller talks a lot about "dense packing." Maybe sometimes it's better not to pack a hairline so densely?

Congrats. That is a mega MEGA session. I'm eager to follow the updates on how it grows in and how the donor heals up.

Your anxiety is pretty normal. I've been through it myself regarding something similar. Having said that, it's still far too early to tell what your result is going to be. I don't think you will know what kind of growth you're going to see until about 1 year. It might continue to thicken and mature for up to 2 years.

Are most of the poor growth posters as of late people who've had FUE or strip? And any of them first timers?

Dr. Lindsey, What would you define as a smallish case?

A lot of what you're saying is either anecdotal, unproven, or purely an opinion. I'm not going to bother sorting out what is what other than to state the following. A vegan diet properly planned (which I carefully stated) IS healthy. The key is properly planned. It tends to have more fiber, phytochemicals, and antioxidants. There's a strong correlation between those things and wellness. A human being in 2010 does not "need" meat. A properly planned vegan diet can provide everything a person needs to be healthy (except for vitamin B12, which is readily provided in a lot of fortified foods and in multivitamins) without dietary supplements. This isn't even a point of contention between most nutritionists as long as measures are taken to ensure the vegan diet is balanced and planned to ensure for enough amino acids.

It's hard for me to tell based on that pic, but you look alright. I bet in 2 weeks, the redness will have gone down more. Hopefully it won't be noticable. It sucks and it's depressing when you shed the transplanted hair. Be patient though. You're going to look great when it's growing in. One of the awesome things about going the FUE route is that you can keep your hair really really short while you're waiting for it to grow and you still look alright. Some really lucky people actually don't have any tell signs of surgery at all. FUE is a great procedure and it has an exciting future IMO. But as you know, there's still not a lot of surgeons who do it enough and do it well and have a lot of documented results. Umar has some good results out there. Good luck man!

From my understanding, miniaturization isn't noticable to the naked eye until you lose about half of the hair in that area. Then it starts to appear thin. So there's a great benefit in having a good surgeon look at your scalp through magnifation to see if there's any miniaturization in areas of your scalp that you cannot yet see. That way you can help "plan for the worst" in case the bottom does fall out. I'm still willing to bet that MOST but not all people who go with FUE who are disappointed with the yield/results still look ok with their head shaved or buzzed down. It's noticable to guys like us because we are looking for it, but to an untrained eye I don't think it stands out. This is just in case FUE doesn't work out and you want to abort the entire thing and try to move on. Which is a possibilty.

I really sympathize with the OP. But I think you have to face reality that results are never guaranteed in ANYTHING in life and results can be disappointing. Just a month ago I had a surgery done (not a HT) and I'm not sure that I am thrilled with the result. I am supposed to wait many months before the final result is revealed, but I am not sure that it will change for the better enough to make me happy. But before I even called the surgeon for a consultation, I knew that cosmetic surgery is a risk. I don't know where the OP is from, but I imagine he found Dr. Feller by searching online about hair transplants. So at least some research would have had to have been done prior to the surgery. With all of the negative information about HT's online (especially repair cases), I would be surprised if that information didn't come by the OP before he contacted Dr. Feller for surgery. I'm just a guy who reads the boards because I am thinking about getting a HT. From what I've read, Dr. Feller is a good man and a great surgeon. He posts a lot of work online for anybody to see and there's a lot of happy patients of his who share their feedback online. He's very transparent, ethical, and honest (almost too honest) particularly about the limits of some kinds of HT surgery (I've enjoyed reading his opinions on the limits of FUE). He doesn't even remotely strike me as a used car salesman. His website is pretty simple and straightforward, and he isn't pushy or aggressive about selling HT's. The results for the OP's procedure could have been MUCH worse. There are still in 2010 a lot of HT butchers out there without any regard for the patient other than getting them in the chair and taking their money, overpromising them everything in the process. From what I've read (and mind you that is only based on reading boards like this one), Feller is the exact opposite of that. The OP is still able to wear his hair short and fortunately doesn't look disfigured. I presume that there's a strip scar in the donor area? Hopefully it will be very easy to conceal. That's just my 2 cents.

This is a great question and I'd love to know the answer myself! I bet it varies a lot based on the extraction pattern and healing characteristics. In the ideal situation, the donor extractions would be really neat and taken in irregular patterns so that if you later had a strip procedure which stretched the skin and thinned the donor hair density, it wouldn't leave gaps of bare skin or an unsightly donor area. Maybe the extraction pattern factor would be more favorable in this situation if the donor that were harvested came from a larger area instead of a smaller, more concentrated area? If you're one of the unlucky ones who gets the visible white dots (hypopigmentation) maybe the stretching of the skin from a strip procedure would make the FUE dots more visible? At any rate, less than a thousand grafts isn't going to cover much area. That's a pretty small procedure that I doubt will leave your donor area wrecked, especially in the hands of a good surgeon who uses reasonably small extaction tools. Have you had your scalp looked at under magnification to see if there's areas of miniaturization that you might not be aware of? I would love to read the opinion of a surgeon on this question.

I googled for the pictures. I saw only one bad HT scar. It may have looked bad because it was pretty new. I think that probably all look bad at first. It was pretty bad that the very first hit I got on google was a youtube video about it on inside addition. Yeah, he's obviously not being forthright about it, but why should he? Men are not socialized in our culture to view the loss of hair as anything but a bad thing. How many bald Presidents have we had lately? Or bald public figures in general? Or leading Hollywood actors? Not many. Kinda lame for Inside Edition to make a story out of it and waste airtime with it, but I think women have been dealing with their own issues being exposed publicly and now it's swinging in the other direction. Life isn't fair. It's good to some, terrible to others. Most of us get a mixed hand and we just have to deal with it. I'm sure that once the hairloss affliction all of us obsess about ceases to be an issue, we'll find another way to discriminate in its place.

Thanks everyone. Yeah, hair almost looks identical as it was when I was 22 and started Fin. Maybe a little difference in that the forelock area has thinned a bit. In those pics, my hair was buzzed pretty short with a #2. I also have some scars on my head, in front, on top, and in the back. One of them is very visible from the back because hair doesn't grow from it. Fortunately, it's pretty small. I've emailed my pics to a fair number of surgeons, all but 3 of them recommended by this site. About half of them replied saying that I shouldn't get a hair transplant yet and that I should continue to try meds. The others were pretty lukewarm about moving forward with a HT, based on my pictures at least. I've never been seen in person by a HT surgeon, and I think it's probably the only way to get questions answered at this point. I don't know if my donor area appears thin in some pics because of the lighting, because of my scars, or because of actual donor thinning. I guess there's no way to know unless I see a surgeon who can look at my scalp under a microscope, measure the density, check my scalp laxity, and determine where there's miniaturization. I live in the midwest. One doctor I like a lot - based on what I read and the results I see - is Shapiro in MN, who is only about 4 hours from me. I can probably get a better idea of things if I see him in person. Thanks for all of the feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

Yeah, native hairs can fall out from shock loss. If they are miniaturizing, they may never come back. I've read that minimally thinning areas are tough to transplant because you can lose as much as you gain. In my case, my temples just bother me and I'd like to move them forward slightly - where there's no hair - so I have a softer hairline.

Pictures of Jeremy Piven? What can I see them?

Thanks again for the kind words. One thing I keep hearing is that from my pictures my donor area doesn't look strong enough to support substantial hairloss. Even though I'm on meds and intend to stay on them, I guess it's not a guarantee that it will keep me from losing more hair. Plus the family history of hairloss is another potential variable.

You could start getting consultations in place. Actually having the surgery and planning to have the surgery are two completely different things. It can take months just to get a surgery date with a great surgeon. I have had a septorhinoplasty and it's a very serious procedure. Make sure that you really do your homework before making the move. You need to do just as much research on it as you would a HT. I can't stress that enough.

Thank you for saying that. I just wanted a small number of grafts, not even a thousand, placed in the temples to make the angle a little softer. When looking at one of the top or back pics, you might notice that there's a bare area with no hair. It's a small little area a couple inches long that's thin like a line. That is a scar where I suffered a head injury about 10 years ago. I had to have staples in my scalp for several days because of the lacerations.