Noodles123

Elective cosmetic surgery is exactly that. Cosmetic surgeons are not in the business of "helping" anyone. Patients are free to exercise the power of the purse and not use a particular surgeon if they believe he charges an exorbitant fee. Eventually these doctors who charge higher fees will be forced to reduce their prices.

IMO the price of fue in the states has to drop because IMO the demand for fue is slowly killing off fut and europe and especially turkey have perfected fue over the last 10 years

This has left the states dead in the water floundering about because of its own laws that technicians cannot be fully utilised as they are in europe and Turkey.

And this nonsense that techs can't do this and can't do that is ridiculous as is clear with Erdogan and Lorenzo to name a couple that have been utilising techs for years and their results are still top of the tree.

I dont know if the states is ever going to catch up with europe and turkey and at the moment the way is drop prices dramatically otherwise people are going to drive by the US clinics on their way to the airport.

For the sake of US sufferers I hope a big change comes and comes quickly because for far to long now the USdocs have been over charging people they are meant to be helping.

Have a nice day

The one thing I would change if I had to do it over again is that I would have done a much larger procedure and reach as much of my goal as possible in one shot (granted if you have a fairly good guess as to your ultimate balding pattern). Getting a hair transplant is incredibly disruptive to one's life for at least 3-4 months before you get out of that ugly duckling period. If you are sure you want to do a future session anyway, I'd go for a larger procedure and stick with the medicine so that you can have a great result for as long as possible.

Not much to add other than this is a nice final outcome from a pretty negative initial experience. How many grafts was the touch up procedure with Arocha? Sorry if you mentioned it.

Cosmetic surgery is not a God-given unalienable human right. Let's face it, we do it because we're vain to a certain extent.

I thought that you could NOT be on propecia because it interferes with testing for banned substances, like giving false negatives or something. Don't quote me on that.

Just a heads up to watch out for some hack surgeon in Irvine / Las Vegas that is using H&W pictures on his website, ModenaHair.com. The surgeon is Amir Yazdan.

The pictures are cropped to show only the hairline but the signature blue background gave it right away.

The Patient on H&W website.

Hair Transplant Photos Hair Transplant Gallery - Hasson & Wong. Sessions: 1. Grafts: 4200

Rocking that pompadour.

There is the issue that Rahal does not do all the FUE extractions himself. That may have changed, but it's up to you if that matters.

My very close friend recently had an FUT with Rahal, and let me tell you, his scar after 3 months is a NON issue. It's so narrow. Of course, personal physiology plays a role, but I think Rahal's superlative skills speak for themselves.

This is only a personal observation, but there have been other medications that I use where the effect is noticeable immediately. I also take Zolpidem, which is generic for Ambien, for severe insomnia and there have been occasions where the pharmacy switched manufacturers and I noticed immediately the reduction in potency. In this situation, it's easy to note the difference right away since ambien works in under 30 minutes. For something like Propecia, any difference in potency would only be appreciable after months of being on it and then noticing increased hair loss. The problem is that you've already lost ground before you notice that difference.

For me, the increased shedding and lack of consistency was enough to convince me to shell out money for the brand name Proscar. At least I save some money by cutting up the Proscar instead of paying retail for Propecia.

Unfortunately, I've experienced fullness behind the nipple as well, or otherwise known as puffy nipples. I'm at a point where I am seriously considering surgery, but it's so freaking expensive. Is it absolutely horrible? No, but it is visible through more fitted clothes and bothers me to no end.

I bought the generic finasteride and cut up the pills. I did this for years until I started to notice that the generics were inconsistent and I had increased shedding on them. I specifically asked my doc to prescribe brand name Proscar by Merck, and did not have the same problems. Despite the usual line about generics being equivalent to brand name drugs, in my experience that is just not always true.

Agree with Joe, if this is the result of only 1 year's worth of hair loss, something else may be going on - not to alarm you. That would be super aggressive hair loss given such a short period of time. I think surgery when your hair loss is not stabilized will only make matters worse. Given that your hair is so fine, either surgery, FUT or FUE, would result in visible scarring and an overall less than ideal look.

Might be necrosis. I'd have this looked at immediately.

Extremely impressive and meticulous work.

I think we are as well but I think that it is a lower number of hairs discarded because the hairs in telogen (10% to 14%) are distributed through all of the follicular units regardless of the number of hairs in each grouping. For every 100 hairs (some are part of multi-hair FU, some as single hair FU) as many as 14 will be in telogen but because single hair FU's make up no more than about 25% of all FU's on the scalp we have to apply the maximum 14% to that specific subset. As you said, the loss of a single hair to telogen in a multi-hair FU means that the FU will not be discarded. Since it is only the single hair FU's that are discarded due to telogen making them invisible the number drops to 3.5 on average per 100 hairs harvested. This means that for every 1000 grafts we are looking at 35 hairs and for every 4000 grafts we are at 140. I hope this makes sense.

This is such an excellent explanation. Joe, you really have a talent for putting technical concepts in plain English and for responding to arm chair experts.

So did you ever get that second procedure olmert?

It looks nice. I would agree though that making an irregular hairline is good, but you don't want to make it look too "regularly IRRegular" to the point where it looks like a pattern. The human eye spots patterns and if you start making peaks and valleys in the hairline at regular intervals it does start to look like a pattern as opposed to a natural randomness.

In my mind FUE would definitely have a more noticeable impact on density globally throughout the scalp than FUT. If you extract the same number of grafts via FUE as you would FUT, there will be a more visible depletion of density in the FUE case.

Of course FUT would also decrease density, but it would be greatest near the incision and lessen as you move further away because the greatest amount of tension is at the incision line. So yes, in both cases density would be reduced but the "visual impact" is more in FUE because it is spread all over equally, versus concentrated more at the incision line in FUT.

It's extremely telling that this guy has gone out of his way to respond to every single negative-sounding comment, and yet cannot post any photos to demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt his "disastrous" results. He is supposedly worried about his identity? How is possible with a cropped photo, or blacked out face. What I still don't get is why is the crookedness of the hairline more pronounced in the fully grown out pictures, versus the immediate post op photos.

As an objective observer with zero interest in this matter, it seems like he thought that he could just create a thread and whip up enough drama to force H&W to give him his "complete refund." He fully expected them to acquiesce and just put the matter to bed. Clearly he did not anticipate this much push back from the community. From my experience, most people on here are reasonable and logical. If you appealed to their logic, I've seen more times than not, the members here stand behind and support the patient.

HairFramer, you know what would silence everyone? POST THE PICTURES. Show the devastating damage, and stop wasting so much time responding to every supposed slight.

What anonymity Dr. Wong and H&W knows who he is :rolleyes:

 

If anyone is leveraging the anonymity of the internet to smear someone is you and you do it to him!

DUH.... The rest of the internet doesn't know who he is.

Everything this guys claims has been repeatedly refuted. There clearly was communication at many points post op, and not radio silence from H&W as this guy claims.

I'm just going to say it. Yes you have a crooked hairline, although not severe. At this point, from your demands it sounds like you want a complete refund. This sounds like a shakedown to get a free hair transplant.

Spanker, I may have used a hyperbole to make a point. You are correct, not every doctor hands everything off to techs after the strip is removed. Dr. Konoir is the most notable exception, but the vast majority of very high quality doctors do rely heavily on techs to do the dissecting and implanting, which I've gathered is the longest and most tedious part of the surgery. The way the OP worded it made it seem as if he was totally surprised by this practice, while in reality it is what happens in most cases. It is not unusual.

To the OP, I agree that it looks noticeably asymmetrical with the buzz cut, but it did not look as apparent in the immediate post op picture. Do you have any other pics of your head immediately post op so we can get an idea of the graft placement?

I'm the only other rep that commented with quotes but I wasn't making an argument, I was correcting an untrue statement with a fact and it was neutral in regards to the purpose on the thread.

Was it also visibly crooked immediately post op? It's noticeable when you shave it down to a 1 guard, but by no means "disastrous." You can certainly make things more symmetrical by transplanting more on the right side.

And I'm not sure the part about Dr. Wong disappearing for the remainder of the surgery is a fair charge. EVERYONE hands it off to the techs after the strip is removed. At most, the doctor pops in back and forth to supervise and maintain quality control.

It's really hard to evaluate Umar's true capability on a "regular" hair transplant case, because the pictures he presents are always end of the line cases. These are guys who have pretty much exhausted all their options and have been left disfigured by shoddy surgeons. I'm sure for these guys, looking somewhat normal is a tremendous relief. Of the "regular" cases I have seen, I have not been impressed at all and the results have been extremely inconsistent. I can't remember a regular case that could even be considered to be in the same league as a Rahal or any of the recommended European FUE experts.

I would agree that of those 3, Diep is the most consistent and has the largest body of work. Where I think Diep has excelled is his work on African American hair, which is typically difficult to do FUE on. Where I think he needs to do some work is in graft placement and to achieve better densities, as some results look a little sparse.

As for Rassman, even when he was practicing I was not impressed. He seems more like an academic than a talented surgeon, as his results just couldn't compete with the best.