Shadow of the EMpire State

Thank you very much for your valuable input. I will do some reading then, and get back with more questions. If you have any concrete recommendations for Chicago area surgeons, I'd love to hear. I'm willing to spend up to 15k to solve this problem right, and for good.

First, you can't solve it for good. Hair loss is a progressive disease, meaning that you will never be done with it "for good" unless you shave your head.

Second, you mustn't limit yourself to local surgeons. The people on these forums fly all over the country and the world to see the right surgeon, and if you're smart, you'll be prepared to do the same.

Btw, what's the opinion on here for Hair Club Extreme Therapy? Couldn't find any recent posts on it.

Drop the Hair Club thing. Nothing they're going to sell you is any good.

Ok, thanks. If anyone has any more specific insights, please share. Here is a description of it:

 

Surgical Hair Restoration | Hair Club ®

The link you posted describes a traditional strip procedure. It's nothing new or innovative, and it almost certainly won't be performed by someone with a verifiable track record on these forums.

Also, as I said, doing anything with a large corporation like Hair Club will likely prove a disaster. Surgery is not one of Hair Club's core competencies (does it have any?). It's just an attempt to dip its toe into the lucrative hair-transplant vertical.

Stay away. Start with the surgeons recommended by this forum and then whittle it down from there.

Thanks. Anything more concrete? Specifically, how is the Hair Club surgical procedure, what's the consensus on it?

I've never heard of it, and although I'm no longer a daily participant here, I'd regard that as a bad sign.

As a general rule, stay away from any chain and any surgeon who's associated with one. That means no Bosley, no Hair Club, etc.

What else do people recommend?

Go through the the "Results Posted by Leading Hair Restoration Clinics" forum, and you'll start to get some ideas.

Do what most of us did. Before bed, spend an hour or so reading this forum. Before long, you'll know what your options are.

Why wouldn't i? Finasteride is a great drug that works to stop hair loss with a low incidence of side effects. If you can't accept that, too bad.

Well, respectfully, there's a lot of people who can't accept it, including a torrent of disaffected users and some well-respected doctors. Moreover, the warning label on the bottle was recently changed to add permanent side effects as a risk. In that connection, it's well to recall that Merck previously claimed that all adverse symptoms would abate upon discontinuing the drug. And now of course, it seems to have abandoned that claim.

If the drug has worked for you, fine, but you don't know that the incidence of side effects is "low."

Don't know that I'd be cooing about this.

Looks OK for five months.

I think 2000-2500 grafts would be really insane to cover such a small zone.

It's not that small. Sure, you have a pretty good head of hair for 38, but to get a non-balding "mature" hairline, 2,000-2,500 seems about right. Of course, it would've helped had you taken a picture of the front of your face so that we could gain a better understanding of how high your hairline actually is.

I mean what about if I end up Norwood 6 when I will be 50-55..

That's highly unlikely to happen given your age and Norwood pattern. There have been studies on this, and Dr. Raissman has referred to some of them at his web site. Basically, the overwhelming majority of people who are destined for the Norwood 6-7 category will reach that stage by 30. Meanwhile, you're nowhere close. Moreover, you've been losing hair since 16, so yours has been a very slow process. Frankly, in my lay opinion, I think you're probably a good candidate for an aggressive procedure.

Dear balding friends,

 

please see a first summary of my FUE experience with Dr. Tejinder Bhatti, for the plantation of 1,500 grafts to my crown area.

 

About me:

37 year old going on 38.

Fairly good hair all around except for a stupid thin patch at the back.

Only using Minoxidil in the evenings and Biotin tablets

Non-smoker.

OK. Just remember one thing: in order to BE the man, you've gotta BEAT the man.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Looks like a nice, subtle result.

That's a hell of a lot of grafts (2,145) for a "subtle result."

1. Terrific result.

2. Was the donor area too high?

3. Was it too risky a procedure for a 25-year old?

always appreciate videos - would be great to see a comb-through and some donor post-ops to indicate FUE

He has tons of videos on youtube. Go have a look.

I like Diep a lot. I think he does excellent work.

But $7 to $8 is too steep for me, and I do better than most.

No its not, even if you have a lot of hair loss, there is more you can lose. Some people might be happy to take that risk, I sure am. Plus the risk of impotence is quite low.

Problem is, we don't know how low it is. We were told two percent, but of course, that's a self-serving figure that's been challenged with some considerable evidence. And the other part is the potential permanence of the side effects.

You may think the risk is not worth it, but it isn't about what you think. It may be your opinion but it is not everybody else's.

That's true. Everyone has to make the decision for himself.

If you're facing aggressive hair loss, and you get an HT without fin, that hair is going to look weird when your native hair falls out.

Truth is, if you're "facing aggressive hair loss," no drug in the world is going to keep hair on your head for too long. People in that category are generally not good candidates for a hair transplant anyway.

A little overly-aggressive with the hairline placement and temporal points in my opinion, its obvious this young man is going to have more hair loss in the future.

I would like to know how old the gentleman is, but I'm still constrained to disagree with your assessment of the hairline. What sense is there in enduring the financial setback, discomfort, inconvenience and general annoyance of a hair transplant if the goal is simply to appear balding rather than bald?

It's very important not to let price impact your decision too much. Remember: this is a surgical procedure, not a TV set; getting a bargain should not be a main consideration.

Regrettably, I think your hairloss is too advanced to obtain what you would probably regard as a cosmetically acceptable result.

I think you have to choose between making peace with your head and waiting for some form of hair cloning.

Hi,

 

I have question about something that has been concerning me...

 

Basically the majority of my hair is thinning apart from the front which is gone. I have started minox and propecia (two months now). I am concerned that if I get fue transplants beside areas of thick thinning hair that it may cause the thinning follicles to die and i will not get the benefits of propecia and minox.

 

Is this cause for concern?

 

Thanks,

John

Is your name John Lennon?

I know you have endured a lot to to educate us.

Is it possible to vomit in a digital environment?

unfortunately I too am not a fan of Dr. Diep's zig zag hairline designs.

Do yourself a favor and type "diep" "and "fue" into youtube, and you'll see some of the best hairline results in America. In fact, I know of no other American doctor who has posted better results on video.

That said, I'm not in love with the result depicted in this thread.

I haven't seen your pictures, but I can't help but wonder whether you'll get the result you want if you're a NW 5 at age 30.

Of course, Rahal is a fine surgeon, so the problem isn't with him; it's with the limitations of modern medicine. And from what I've seen over the course of 12+ years on these forums, it's exceedingly difficult to get a good result if you're beyond the NW 3-4 range. There simply isn't enough hair to go around.

Yes, there are outliers like some of the early H&W patients who managed acceptable results despite advanced baldness. But they are the exception, not the rule. The rule is that hair transplants look best on people with limited hair loss, and the reason for that is obvious.

I wish you good luck.

Marginal improvement in the front, which, to me, is always most important.

But the crown looks quite good.

Whenever I'm on this site, I feel inclined to underscore the limitations of hair-transplant surgery.

Sadly, many people are disposed to fanboyism; to treating these doctors like rockstars; and to thinking that they can simply waltz in with a NW 4-5-6 pattern and get a great result.

Well, in most cases, it's just not true. And that's because, no matter who your doctor is, there's going to be too little hair to cover the bald space---unless you have outstanding hair characteristics.

Look, optimism is great but not at the expense of realism. The current state of hair-transplant technology is such that the only people who should "expect" to emerge from surgery with a non-balding look are those in the Norwood 2 and 3 classifications.

Ah, Feller. Sigh.

At least he doesn't think he's the living incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Not yet anyway.

When I read the blurb, I couldn't help but laugh.

Obviously, the strippers are gonna go out kicking and screaming; the public will have to pry the scalpels from their cold, dead hands.

Look, I don't know anything about medicine. But in this case, I don't think you have to. It's really simple: once the public gets a taste of any new technology that's more convenient and less invasive, it won't ever accept anything less.

Now sure, there are some lingering problems with FUE yield, but public concern over those problems will manifest itself in the form of greater pressure to improve the FUE technique, not a willingness to go back to strip.

Selling strip in 2015 is like selling VHS in 1998.

It's over, Johnny.

1. Patients that don't want a linear don't give a damn about it being 1mm to 2mm. It still is a linear scar.

Yeah, that's pretty much the beginning, middle, and end of the argument.