gilgamesh

Your adolescent response and troll finger pointing is typical of reactionary internet clowns. The age of an account, or the quantity of its posts has little relevance to the content of its posts. I have no one I am trying to promote, nor do I have any economic interest. I am simply a hair loss sufferer who has consulted with multiple physicians in search of my best option. Any responsible person on this forum should be doing the same. Nothing has kept me 'out' of this community, not even sure what that means. It is a free forum, anyone may sign up as they please. I think what may be unnerving to you is that I have no ulterior motive or angle I'm trying to promote. I am simply in search of the truth about a subject that has been mired in internet muck for far too long.

Researching my decisions before I make them has worked out quite well for me. I don't think any of us would be here if we did not share that sentiment. And this isn't 'manusha' -- I am talking about most fundamental question of surgical hair restoration that we are dealing with at the moment. But as you said, to each their own.

He is essentially the Ralph Nader of the GOP and has the mental sophistication of a New York bar drunk/internet troll, but it was only an analogy -- let's not let this wander off topic. The point is that I am tired of physicians, representatives and patient acolytes skirting the basic issue. We need to return to the scientific method, not this marketing hype and absurd hyperbole. The amount of research coming out on hair loss each year is still quite impressive, and the research funding is not insubstantial (go to the ISHRS website or search the NIH database, it is free), yet somehow everyone is still dancing around this basic study. It reminds me of global warming -- 50% of the lay public is undecided, but 95% of the scientific community is certain. Why? They have to stick to the proven evidence, and most do not have an economic incentive to disprove it. The internet revolution is providing us an opportunity to shine the light of reason on an issue that has long been in the dark, let us take advantage of it so that later we do not look back and say 'It's so obvious now, how did it take so long to figure this out.'

Based on what data? You just ignored my post. Unfortunately, I've seen too many of your patients with poor outcomes post on the various hair loss forums to take what you say that seriously. The same unfortunately goes for Feller. Both of you will in turn say, 'well of course the unhappy patients are the ones that go online to complain about their results,' and 'some bad outcomes are inevitable and have nothing to do with the procedure'. And while this may be true, of course the human mind will favor the explanation that absolves them of blame -- both the patients and physicians are guilty of this at inverse times. Speaking with the elites in either field (Konior, Lorenzo, Feriduni, etc) they have all ultimately said about the same thing, none of them are as polemical as either of you. That is the hallmark of an insightful perspective. Donald Trump, as entertaining as he is, will never be taken seriously by the American people, let alone the rest of the world. Approaching it from a theoretical perspective, I can see no way to consistently obtain 'chubby' grafts and preserve the surrounding stem cell at the follicle base when you are going in blind. Even when doing strip this is difficult. It's like trying to accurately cut the hair on the back of your head with no mirror. I agree with the poster who said earlier that more studies need to be done. Yes, absolutely, I hope the Beehner story isn't the end of the road. It would be sad if it was. Even if they were small scale, at least they could be compiled into a meta analysis and a more up to date standard could be established. Until then, your impassioned posts, even if you believe them, cannot by definition carry that much weight. Unfortunately the same goes for any physician in the hair loss community. Even if they do both procedures, there is always one that is preferred by a practice for whatever reason (economics, convenience, cheaper labor supply, cheaper materials, lest time investment, etc). If the data were there, FUE advocates would publish it because of the insane boom in business it would portend. Especially with the lower 'worst case scenario' risk with the procedure. However until then, I can't take internet marketing that seriously. There have been countless great medical theories over time that have resulted in countless consumer dollars spent. But as someone who appreciates the beauty of science, I'll believe it when I see at least some attempt at an objective consensus. Not just a single physician's personal experience in a specific patient population, as he guesstimates it. As in any business, the one selling the product will always downplay the negatives.

Honestly, I wouldn't trust either of you till you let an independent observer judge your results in a controlled trial. It is quite easy to believe your own hype when profit is to be gained. Doctors are no different than anyone else in that regard. Sumerian doctors thought beer cured illnesses, in the dark ages leeches, in the 1900s colloidal silver, and today in some parts of the world physicians advise patients to drink their own urine. Most of these physicians believed honestly in the treatments they were prescribing. If FUT was really better than the newer FUE techniques, and a study came out proving this, the physicians practicing strip would make amazing gains. If FUE was really better than FUT, and they were verified by independent research, the influx of business FUE doctors would gain would be staggering. The resistance of the forum to the basic scientific method, and reliance on internet marketing is amazing and disappointing. Thank you to whoever posted the Beehner data. I haven't seen any work since then. Until something better comes along, that is the closest thing to evidence that we have. Everything else is just marketing.

Blake, a search on medline through the NIH data base shows that most studies are not decades long, but instead start with short term outcomes and then progress. If decades were needed for any new surgical technique to be vetted, medical research would come to a standstill. The answer to 99 out of a 100 questions is: money. Who makes money if FUE is shown to be equivalent to FUT? Who loses money? Where does funding usually come from for trials of surgical procedures? Especially cosmetic ones? I think a great example of how quickly medical research can progress on high impact issues in cosmetics is the silicon versus saline breast implant debate. Who funded the research? Why? And why did the tide turn back? Like politics, medical research in the United States pretends it is not intimately based on economics, but unfortunately, like politics, that is the fundamental problem. The reason the study doesn't exist is the same reason dutasteride hasn't been approved for hair loss yet. There is no one with enough potential economic gain to make it worth their while to invest. If you notice, the companies that make most FUE specific devices also have major products in the FUT market. There is no competition, it's a monopoly from their stand point. They would rather devote the funds to something more worth their while -- ie. profitable. While the study is not complex, the resources of surgeons, patients, and statisticians need to be coordinated. And it's hard to get government funding for cosmetic procedures in healthy patients.