PupDaddy

therambler, That is looking beautiful. Just beautiful. Utterly natural and suitable, with no signs of a transplant. What every ht patient would wish for. Can't wait to see your 1-year pics!

Big change even from month 7 to month 8. Looks to have matured nicely in that interim. Congrats!

I think maybe we're being tripped up by semantics. The terms "specialist" and "specialize" can connote varying meanings. I think hairweare was using it in the sense of an ht doc performing FUE predominantly or exclusively vs. FUT, whereas I think Matt was using it to mean adept, skilled, or experienced. As between Dr. Rahal and Dr. Konior, the former has published many more FUE results, and he more aggressively promotes FUE in his practice (even trademarking a name for it, which I think is kind of silly but does indicate a focus on marketing FUE). It is probably fair to say that Dr. Rahal and his team(s) have performed substantially more FUE transplants than Dr. Konior and his team, and that FUE comprises a larger percentage of Dr. Rahal's practice than Dr. Konior's. That said, Dr. Konior is much more present and hands-on for his transplant procedures, and he still operates on only one patient per day. Last I checked, he was limiting FUE procedures to around 1,500 or so grafts per transplant, whereas I believe Dr. Rahal's clinic will do around 2,500 or so grafts per FUE transplant. Neither Konior nor Rahal were doing consecutive day FUE transplants, so you would need two staggered transplants if you required more grafts than their per-session maximums. Dr. Rahal's technicians do most or all of the extractions, using a hand-held motorized punch, whereas I believe that Dr. Konior does most or all of his own extractions, using either manual punches or Dr. Cole's PCID (Powered Cole Isolation Device). This info could be out of date so you would want to check with the clinics. Frankly, as of today, as between these two gifted physicians, I'm not sure which I would choose. In other words OP, I'm punting.

Thank you, Bill. This guy, along with GraveD11gger-MikroFUE, were particularly distasteful and disruptive members of the Maral Mafia. Already the forum is calmer and more civil.

Bill has already stated that the one match with the Longevita account could have been an anomaly, but that the others are more compelling and lack any reasonable explanation for sharing multiple IP addresses. So let's start with shutting down GraveD11gger, MikroFUE, fisher4man, and truthfu11. Notice that with the exception of MikroFUE, the purported online rep for the clinic that started this mess, the three aliases each use numbers/digits in place of certain letters? Coincidence? I think not. See ya!

Such beautiful work, with even more maturing to come. Good call and plan to leave some of his frontal native hairline hairs as they were for additional softness and naturalness. Excellent!

Wow. Beautiful, natural transformation. Congrats to you, Atlanta, and to Dr. Cooley!

I love how he tries to cover his tracks by claiming that "MikroFUE," with whom he has been found to share an ip, has been fired from the clinic. Right. It is more evident than ever that this forum needs to be scrubbed clean of this/these promoter(s) and troll(s) so we can return to useful and civil discourse about pertinent matters for ht candidates and ht patients.

Good luck with your second session, to transplant further loss behind your hairline. Maras' work on you was looking great. If you can tolerate taking finasteride again, this would be a good time to start. Please give us photo updates as you go along!

The sooner the better so far as I am concerned. The boorish behavior of this guy, not to mention his (I'm sorry, "their") ceaseless Maral promotion, competition bashing, and moderator baiting, has lowered the level of discourse here for months and very nearly turned this place into The Maral Kinik forum. I suppose that was his (darn, "their") aim, so congratulations. Now adios.

In your shoes, TheLGM, I would cancel the procedure with the technician clinic and not book a different clinic right now. Trying to salvage the date under this kind of pressure isn't ideal. If you don't take the flights you have alredy booked, won't you be able to use the flights at another time within the year, possibly with a modest change feee? If not, perhaps you could instead use the flights and hopefully book some in-person consults with three or four reputablee docs in Instanbul, including the ones you mentioned. Some clinics will offer you installment plans or financing. Don't feel too bad about being lured by this sort of clinic. It and its reps have been engaged in a heavy promotional campaign on multiple forums, including this one. Have a pint (or three), and proceed cautiously!

Uhm, maybe you guys didn't get yesterday's news about "GraveD11gger?" Bill did some ISP sleuthimg. Apparently, GraveD11gger was Maral's rep, MikroFUE, who used the GraveD11gger alias and a number of other aliases (Fisher4man, Truthfu11, lifeisbeautiful, Longetiva) to promote The Maral Klinik and its technician-only FUE model, and to bash the competition. None of these aliases have made an appearance since. I think it safe to say that MikroFUE/GraveD11gger/Fisher4man/Truthfu11 (particularly ironic)/Longetiva/lifeisbeautiful has left the building.

Maybe he's trying to convince himself? It would be understandable in light of Bill's exposure yesterday of the apparent massive fraud perpetrated on this forum on behalf of The Maral Klinic. If I were in 1966kph's shoes and had booked my transplant procedure there, I might be seeking approval and reassurance about technician-only transplant surgeries too.

The silence from GraveD11gger/MikroFUE/Fisher4man/etc. is deafening, and damning.

Quote of the year.

Incredible. One of the best ever.

Beautiful work, and an excellent plan.

I posted this in the other threads where Bill has called out GraveD11gger/MikroFUE/Fisher4man/etc. for sharing IP addresses and likely being one and the same person or at least in league -- but I think it bears repeating: If it turns out that GraveD11gger and MikroFUE are one and the same, or are in cahoots, I would not be at all surprised. (In fact, I seem to recall somewhere that GraveD11gger let slip once that he works or worked directly for The Maral Klnic.) From the outset of this blatant promotional campaign for The Maral Klinic, its representatives and shills have engaged in deception and misrepresentation. It began with the initial posts of "MikroFUE," who assured us that Dr. Maral was totally hands-on and personally performed every stage of the FUE ht surgeries at the clinic, with assistance of his technicians. To further convince us that it was Dr. Maral, and not his technicians, that performed the transplant surgeries, "MikroFUE" even went so far as to note that it would violate Turkey's medical-legal laws for anyone other than a licensed aesthetic surgeon such as Dr. Maral to perform ht surgery on patients. As we now know, Maral's supposed hands-on involvement was a total fabrication. When it was exposed that Dr. Maral took no hands-on part in the clinic's FUE transplants, "MikroFUE" changed course and asserted that Dr. Maral "supervised" the clinic's transplants. This supervision supposedly consisted of Dr. Maral briefly checking in on the multiple ht's being performed by his technicians each day, but then we learned from a patient that Dr. Maral wasn't even on the premises while that patient was still being operated on. Don't be fooled. Technician-performed hair transplantation has nothing to do with the patient and everything to do with a clinic's owner maximizing profits by leveraging cheap labor to perform hair transplants. The discounted pricing he is able to charge for hair transplantation relative to expert ht surgeon-performed hair transplantation reflects a willingness to make money by flaunting rules and regulations, not altruism. The business model is low fixed cost (technician salaries) + volume: Run as many patients a day through the technician transplant mill as possible, give technicians motorized punches and motorized recipient incision tools to enable them to keep up the pace, and thus pocket healthy profits without having to get your hands dirty actually performing hair transplants. Brilliant! For the clinic's owner-physician, anyway, who can devote his time to other profitable pursuits while his technicians are drilling away on patients' scalps. Bill, thank you for catching this apparent further deception by this clinic and its "advocates." We await GraveD11gger's explanation.

I posted this in the other threads where Bill has called out GraveD11gger/MikroFUE/Fisher4man/etc. for sharing IP addresses and likely being one and the same person or at least in league -- but I think it bears repeating: If it turns out that GraveD11gger and MikroFUE are one and the same, or are in cahoots, I would not be at all surprised. (In fact, I seem to recall somewhere that GraveD11gger let slip once that he works or worked directly for The Maral Klnic.) From the outset of this blatant promotional campaign for The Maral Klinic, its representatives and shills have engaged in deception and misrepresentation. It began with the initial posts of "MikroFUE," who assured us that Dr. Maral was totally hands-on and personally performed every stage of the FUE ht surgeries at the clinic, with assistance of his technicians. To further convince us that it was Dr. Maral, and not his technicians, that performed the transplant surgeries, "MikroFUE" even went so far as to note that it would violate Turkey's medical-legal laws for anyone other than a licensed aesthetic surgeon such as Dr. Maral to perform ht surgery on patients. As we now know, Maral's supposed hands-on involvement was a total fabrication. When it was exposed that Dr. Maral took no hands-on part in the clinic's FUE transplants, "MikroFUE" changed course and asserted that Dr. Maral "supervised" the clinic's transplants. This supervision supposedly consisted of Dr. Maral briefly checking in on the multiple ht's being performed by his technicians each day, but then we learned from a patient that Dr. Maral wasn't even on the premises while that patient was still being operated on. Don't be fooled. Technician-performed hair transplantation has nothing to do with the patient and everything to do with a clinic's owner maximizing profits by leveraging cheap labor to perform hair transplants. The discounted pricing he is able to charge for hair transplantation relative to expert ht surgeon-performed hair transplantation reflects a willingness to make money by flaunting rules and regulations, not altruism. The business model is low fixed cost (technician salaries) + volume: Run as many patients a day through the technician transplant mill as possible, give technicians motorized punches and motorized recipient incision tools to enable them to keep up the pace, and thus pocket healthy profits without having to get your hands dirty actually performing hair transplants. Brilliant! For the clinic's owner-physician, anyway, who can devote his time to other profitable pursuits while his technicians are drilling away on patients' scalps. Bill, thank you for catching this apparent further deception by this clinic and its "advocates." We await GraveD11gger's explanation.

Would like to see the video update, but as Spamker noted, it's set to private. Love Dr. Wesley's work on this fellow's case. Undetectable as transplant work, and beautiful density behind the hairline thanks to the clever incorporation of DFU"s.

Well said, Blake. Well said.

I don't think that Dr. Erdogan, or any other competent ht doc, implants anything other than 1's in the frontmost zone of the hairline. The issue with his hairlines (some don't think there is an issue and love them) is his preference for a "tight" hairline. He uses very little irregularity/micro-irregularity (zigzagging, spokes, peninsulas, "palsy," outliers, etc) along his fromtal hairlines compared to other docs. That just seems to be his aesthetic and his "thing." I don't know if you could persuade him to exaggerate the irregularity a bit for your case, but I personally think this would add some naturalness to his hairline work, which, to me, can appear a bit harsh. Otherwise his work generally looks outstanding. And as I say, what I see as harsh and somewhat unnatural others see as ideal.

You speak of hair transplantation as though it were a fungible commodity. It isn't. It is a cosmetic surgery. The best at it will, and should, command higher fees. Also -- and don't get upset -- I know that Maral's rep denies that the clinic's low pricing for FUE reflects the delegation of these procedures to technicians, but I find that hard to believe. The higher costs of conducting business in some countries, and in certain states/provinces within those countries, will also be reflected in pricing. In New York City, for example, fees for cosmetic surgeries generally are higher than in other parts of the country due to the higher costs of doing business. Even within a city like New York, fees charged by various cosmetic surgeons for the same procedure vary widely, yet the most expensive cosmetic surgeons are also the busiest. Why? Because their clientele perceive that they are worth it. Such is the market for professional services, be it doctors, lawyers, decorators, tax accountants, artists, coaches, actors, contractors, or what have you. Excellence generates demand and a willingness by the customer to pay more for that professional's services. Good luck with your transplant!

Most of the very best cosmetic results I've seen, and continue to see, have resulted from strip procedures. This could partly be due to more docs having gotten their initial training with strip, meaning more excellent, artistic surgeons and their staffs have had more time and experience with strip, leading to consistently excellent cosmetic results. But I also think that strip harvesting, practiced by the best docs and clinics, simply yields more consistently good grafts than does FUE. That said, FUE tools, techniques, and protocols and technique are rapidly improving (I applaud the doctor you represent, Dr. Vories, for recently ditching the Neograft machine) and paying dividends, although yield continues to lag behind strip, mostly due to higher transection rates and poorer survival and poorer full growth of the skinny grafts obtained via FUE vs. the chubby grafts obtained via strip. Patients' donor areas will yield many more total grafts for multiple ht procedures through a combination of strip and FUE than they would if only one or the other extraction method were available, and the consensus of ht surgeons posting here is that the total lifetime numbers are significantly higher if strips are exhausted first. So I don't know. It isn't so black-and-white as you pose the question. I suspect that if FUE had been developed and perfected first, as the primary method of harvesting grafts for hair transplantation, strip still would have been developed because of the limitation on total harvestable grafts via FUE before the donor area starts to look moth-eaten. It isn't necessarily an either/or situation, but it's an interesting question nonetheless. (Of course, some might argue that you have an incentive to steer prospective ht patients away from strip towards FUE since you represent a doc who only performs FUE -- but I didn't read your post that way.) Please keep us updated on your second pass FUE with Dr. Vories. Good growing!

This fellow's hair still looks terrific, has a lovely head of hair for someone his age, and the work is so refined and appropriate that no one would ever suspect he had a transplant. What more would could one want? Excellent!