About a year and a half ago I had a FUT transplant done by Vance Elliot, before proceeding I searched for reviews but couldn't find any but went ahead with it anyway (big mistake), this is also the reason I'm making this post so that someone else looking for info might stumble across the review.
At my first appointment he fluffed my hair a little, told me I needed a laser cap, brand name propecia/rogaine, all which he would sell me, he claimed the generics wouldn't work. Looking back now I'm assuming this was so he could pocket more profit, I've now switched to generic Propecia and Kirkland rogaine, all of which work exactly the same as the more expensive brand name products. Then we booked an appt for a transplant, he told me 12k which would get me 4000 grafts. Few months later the big day came, in I went and everything got started. The first unusual thing I noticed was when the "doctor" was removing the strip, towards the end instead of carefully removing it he ripped it off, the force threw him back a good few feet. This was my first transplant but I'm assuming this is not normal. Second thing I noticed was Vance leaving the operation room for long periods of time leaving his assistant to do a large portion of the grafts, I paid for a surgeon to do a transplant, not an assistant so I wasn't really pleased with this. Lastly while stiching me up he had a foot up on the chair and made a reference to tying up a pair of skates, I didn't see the humour in it...
After the surgery things didn't go so well, all of the normal symptoms, pain/swelling for the first few days, tight scalp for a few months. At about 4 weeks the shock loss started, both in the recipient and donor area, I lost the majority of hair on my head and had a 1" line running ear to ear. I also had large scabs along the donor area before I got the stitches out, I didn't think much about it at the time but what had happened is he didn't stick it properly and it didn't hold so I'm not left with a really bad scar. What's worse is only approx 50% of the grafts took so it has a really unnatural look now.
I'm in the middle of researching a doctor to correct the scar and fill in some of the areas in the front where the grafts didn't take.
