shai

To everyone asking the cost , I paid INR 40 per graft. I am certain I did not get the number of grafts I was charged for and that means I was duped. This doctor is a plastic surgeon with years of experience but he is greedy and that means you are paying more for what you can get elsewhere. I will end this thread by saying use someone else ..I still think at the time of writing this ..Feb 2019 that FUT is the way to go for the first transplant but I cannot recommend Dr Maneesh Sonthalia simply because he overcharges which is a pity because he is really good but then honesty is not easy in India. I am fortunate enough to not care much about the cost but I am sure there are others who do care and to them I would say look elsewhere. I should also mention that I was made to purchase drugs and Shampoo for a year from the doctors supplier supposedly at a discount which I now realise was a hoax. Having said all of this I must say that I am quite happy with my results and I did not go through an assembly line with 10 other people waiting

Well everything else is grand but I am not so convinced about the number of grafts that he claims to implant. He is very experienced but still it is not logically possible to get the exact no of grafts on a harvest that he has agreed upon nor is it possible to always get 500 more than that number and throw it in for free. If that is the case and there is no way to prove it , then honesty is an issue. Having said that ultimately what counts is the result.

Thanks bud, I cannot see any post from you so I am not sure what kind of procedure you underwent or with whom but I am sure you will get a good result, as long as you did you r research prior. Finaesteride can cause side effects in some people but you will experience them in the first month itself if you are one of the unfortunate ones. I have been on them for 10 years now with nil bad effect except the wallet seems lighter 🙂 . I also drank and smoked 3 days after transplant but obviously that is not something I would encourage !! For the most part if the harvesting and implant was done properly after the first 2 days not much can harm the implants, growth time varies from person to person, I am still getting some growth

Sorry bud didnt think anyone was interested. Here you go. TBH till I look at old pics I cannot even remember what it feels like to be balding. The crown is still lacking as you can see in the pics. I chose to not lower the hairline beyond what was already there and I am glad I did. Maybe in a few years I will do a FUE to the crown and add more thickness to the front.

I must say that only now I realise how much of a difference lighting makes, the volume and angle of it can make a big difference

Site was down and I was busy ..anyways here goes middle of month 7..Cant say I am thrilled but I am not in tears either. Hopefully still some growth to come... The left side is much slower to grow.. comparison pics from the start of things

That looks mint. Much better than mine at 4 months. Will turn out great

Yeah monthly updates dude. Tell you what that makes 2 of us hoping my research pays off :-D

Yeah voxman, I really wish I was confident enough to say that things will be great..one never knows I guess. Anyways everything is crossed and the groundwork is in so I hope for the best. Thanks Bill , the surgeon is not as famous or as busy as others in this forum and that is one of the reasons I chose him. Time will tell whether I was wrong or right but things look ok so far..touchwood. Thanks for replying guys

Not including the scar as there is nothing to see. The doctor is truly excellent in communication. Sent him the pics, he was touring in Rome, got a reply back in 5 minutes. Hope the end result justifies the whole thing . Its like watching paint dry at the moment

Some growth visible the scar is almost invisible. Looks like things are on track

2 Months ..95% of the grafts have fallen. There is some shock loss around the suture line. Thats the bad news..I reckon thats as bad as it goes..from here on fingers crossed it is all going to be good

Thanks bud ..yeah waiting is the hardest part of the whole exercise.

Wow this thread is not exactly setting things on fire is it :-) . Anyways just a small update got tired of looking like Joker from Batman so went and got a no 1 all around to see clearly where things are at. It is not yet 1 month and I was told by the doc to wait for a month before getting a haircut.Oh well. Anyways there is a lot of graft loss on the sides but I am hoping its just shock loss. Surprisingly a lot of the grafts have started growing, not sure if it is because of the finaesteride or maybe I will lose them as well. The scar doesnt look too bad for less than a month . Lets see what 3 months bring. Please feel free to comment.. negative or positive does not matter

I am a 42 year old male of Indian origin living in Perth Australia. I have hereditary baldness and have tried Minoxidil and Fianesteride. The former did nothing, the latter slowed down my balding almost to a halt over 9 years of use. Since October 2017 I have been researching, asking questions on forums, reading up as much as I can, to repair the damage that had happened before I started on Finaesteride. I am a Norwood 4 by my reckoning. This is my account and contribution to this forum through which I learnt so much. Hope this helps out others. The first thing I did was make a list of "must haves" which my surgeon needs to demonstrate 1. Must be exclusively involved in hair transplants 2. Must be personally involved in every aspect of the procedure 3. The team involved must have at least 2-3 years of experience..No noob was touching my hair 4. The surgeon had to be a surgeon.. not a dermatologist not a GP Next I shortlisted 5 surgeons all over India based on online reviews avoiding anyone who did not have any reviews and anyone who had too many negative reviews. Remember no doctor is going to have a 100% track record . I then sent them the following images online and initiated discussions I asked every question to ensure my core needs were met and took a quote. This took a while as there were a fare few emails going back and forth. I realised that I would prefer a FUT procedure for my first hair transplant for a number of reasons which I will not get into but the most important being that I did not mind the scar and secondly I wanted to minimise the loss of harvested grafts . Anyway I shortlisted 2 surgeons and then finally I fixed onto Dr Maneesh Sonthalia in the city of Kolkata. Neither the city nor the Doctor has any prior reviews on this forum but I saw his reviews online and was pleasantly surprised by the number of positive reviews. 16 years experience doing transplants, core team does 15-20 transplants every month, excellent feedback ..so on paper everything was gold. I booked in a first meet on the 29th Jan followed by the operation on 30th Jan 2018 .. this was in the begining of Dec 2017 I booked a hotel about 5 minutes walk from the doctors chambers, bear in mind I had never met the man before so obviously I was on guard prior to my first meeting. I walked into his chamber and felt like I had made a mistake. It looked like a completely unprofessional set up. People lounging around, making tele calls to potential clients, no doctor to be seen, I was about to bail but said I might as well meet the guy since I was there. And boy am I glad I did !! Talk about judging a book by its cover !! Doctor Sonthalia is not unprofessional, he is very personal treating his patients like family and that extends to his chambers. This took some getting used to for me since I am used to the anaesthetic business like approach of Doctors in Australia. I had a long chat with him. He worked with me on a design, explained the whys and hows , showed me past results of similar cases, took me through medical journals outlining FUT vs FUE (he wrongly or rightly is a big supporter of FUT). I was sold and settled for early start the next day. 30th Jan 2017, the operation happened. At the very onset let me say the blocker into the forehead is pretty painful but barring that no pain at all during and after the operation. There is a lot of writeups on this forum of the process of a FUT operation so I will not go into details but happy to answer questions if anyone has any. Dr Sonthalia did the actual harvesting. A team of 7 people including another doctor (part of his team) did the graft extraction. I was shown the design before starting. 4400 grafts were extracted, 42 were wasted ( I was told that there will be around 1% loss). The wasted grafts, and the extraction process was shown and explained. Lunch was from Dr Sonthalia's home, fantastic vegetarian fare for the whole team. The planting was done by 2 people rotating to prevent human error, supervised by Dr Sonthalia. I had signed up for 4000 grafts and 400 were not charged for which later on having spoken to other patients I understand is always the case with Dr Sonthalia, free 10% grafts to cover for margin of error. Post op med list was given which I had to purchase and doses explained. At the end of the operation the doctor would not let me walk back and insisted on dropping me off in his car to my hotel even though I told him I was feeling fine. For most of his local patients he insists that they come every other day for shampoo to the clinic which is a free service. Being a plastic surgeon he is a bit overly cautious about infections.. to the point of being anal ! It is 18 days now post surgery and I am back in Australia. Throughout this period Dr Sonthalia has been available on Whatsapp whenever I have had doubts or queries. I will be updating this thread with my results at every 3 months. If anyone has any questions I would be very happy to answer. I honestly could not have been happier with my choice of surgeon. To everyone else embarking on the journey, take your time and research and then research some more. Funnily the image links are not showing so attaching some

Thats true even from the first detailed answer I can make out that in most cases with equally experienced doctors both quality and quantity will be better in FUT maybe marginally so and at the cost of a scar but it will be better a yeild, at least at the moment. Having said that of late most FUE results seem excellent

Thanks for that. It was the kind of reply I was looking for

Can any practising surgeon or anyone senior member on the forum confirm or deny my findings (with reasons thereto please) . Please do bear in mind that this is a question regarding quality of grafts and NOT which procedure is better. I realize very well that both procedures are good depending on the patient's needs Assuming similar skill levels/experience for FUE and FUT 1. A FUT transfer can have more people working simultaneously on extracting grafts as opposed to FUE which would lead to reduction in fatigue and human error resulting in better quality of grafts 2. A FUE extract is made blind since the dermal layer is in place and the hair is cut short which means it may be possible that the bulb is at an angle which the punch cuts into as it cannot be visually seen. A FUT extract on the other hand lays open the bulb which makes this a non possibility 3. The drill used in FUE can cause damage to adjacent follicles both because of heat generated via friction and close proximity to the graft being extracted 4. Thickness of follicular cells (fat grafts/skinny grafts) in FUE depends more on luck than skill . In other words a FUT extraction will result in more fat grafts than FUE 90% of times. This in part is similar to point 2 above 5. If any of the above points are true then apart from quality of grafts FUE results in higher transection than FUT , the percentage depending on skill level of the extractor. This last point is more about quantity than quality