Pangloss

Yes, I knew when he said he gets 100% growth that he was lying, because no doctor gets 100%. And to suggest it was true also of Body Hair is absurd. Thanks for the warning about doing something I might regret. Another problem with this dr is I can find no info on him, no reviews on the internet, so I have absolutely no way to judge his competence. But this interruption in my plans (and now I'm hearing that most countries have already decided to remain closed through the rest of 2020, as if this were being centrally planned and dictated to them) does have me thinking that maybe I should just forget about getting another HT entirely.

Interesting as I specifically recall reading, in one of Dr. Umar's papers, that he had a low survival rate with back hairs and said that they should not be used. Another doctor in India told me that the back is not preferred because it scars badly.

Mine grows long too! Maybe we are lucky. But I've read that, with those short anagen phases, body hair doesn't have a chance to grow long before it falls out. In most people. Anyway, with the issues about different texture, curliness, etc. of body hair, keeping them short in the occipital zone would minimize the discrepancy between them and the normal scalp hairs for better aesthetic results. But as I mentioned, there are still many potential problems with doing this.

Because I've been stranded since early in the year in a small Asian country, I consulted with the only HT doctor in town. He told me that he gets 100% growth, even from body hair. He said he has done 50 BHT cases. I find this hard to believe since no natives in this country have upper body hair, they're all smooth skinned. I'm actually considering him. This is the desperation I've been driven to because the border is closed, quarantines if you can manage to travel anywhere, lack of flights and all the rest of this catastrophic overreaction to a microbe that 99.8% of people survive easily and it is overwhelmingly only the old and feeble with multiple chronic comorbidities that actually die from it. Sorry, I don't mean to and don't want to start a big debate, I'm just so frustrated. I'm getting old, I had plans to fix my hair and I'm losing a year out of my life for this bs.

But didn't you just say in an earlier post that "The hair from the thighs, arms, etc have impossible chances of survival on the scalp." How do you explain this singer's good growth with his arm and leg hair?

Well, I sure can't see that short anagen and long telogen phase on my chest and stomach hair. I'm constantly clipping them and if I didn't they'd easily grow 4 inches or longer.

I was thinking about this idea before I read about it here. Because body hair doesn't grow as long as scalp hair, it can easily cover in the back of the head where hair is usually kept short, and the longer native scalp hairs can be put to use on top where their length really makes a difference. The only question is what percent of, say, chest or abdomen hair will survive? Most info I've read says maybe 50 to 60% will survive. But I wonder if that's highly variable depending on the technique used and the skill of the surgeon, and that percentage can improve in the right hands. Also, implanting the hairs into FUT or FUE scars in the donor area might reduce the success percentage even more, because (I've heard) hairs don't survive as well in scar tissue as in normal tissue.

I too am very curious to hear about your results with abdominal hair, krx. When was your surgery? How long did it take for the hairs to start growing? Can you guess what percent of grafts survived? Can you tell us who did the surgery? Do you have any before/after pics? Any visible scarring? What type of punch did doctor use for the abdomen? Thanks.

Very promising results. Aririk, can you estimate what percentage of the thigh hairs used to soften the hairline have started to grow? Also the groin hairs (you mean pubic?) Eugenix is always saying that body hairs other than beard have a low survival rate.

thanks gillenator. I am more concerned about the recipient area, my hairline area where I want to add density. I don't mind transecting a few chest and abdomen hairs, since I have plenty of them, but don't want to damage the existing hairline area hair when attempting to add density. So my question was more about repeatedly poking the recipient area with the anesthetic needle over several sessions on consecutive days. Is that needle very fine or thick? Also worried about the beard area where the hair is pretty dense. Can they inject the anesthesia between the follicles so as to not damage them?

In the case of a clinic like Eugenix, they apparently have four different clinics in different cities. It is doubtful that a surgery performed at the Mumbai clinic would be overseen by the top doctors Sethi and Bansal, since they are far away in the Gurgaon clinic. If I were to choose Eugenix, I would certainly go to the Gurgaon clinic.

Thanks for the replies. BeHappy, yes, that was my experience, too. I'm glad it's better now. I just wonder if the grafts, if some have already been inserted into the recipient area, are firmly enough in there that they won't fall out when I go to the bathroom. And I hope I don't feel faint from loss of blood and maybe fall down!

Okay, this sounds trivial but it isn't. Surgeries can last 9 hours, especially if you're doing body hair. I would undoubtedly have to urinate a few times during the 9 hours. Is this a problem? I remember my first surgery, this was about 35 years ago. I had to go and the doctor acted like this was a major problem. He tried to dissuade me. He finally put a protective bandage over my head and I went to the bathroom. How do doctors deal with this issue today?

Thanks for the reply Paddy. Well, but this illustrates my point. Your surgery was done by Drs. Bansal and Sethi, who are the well-known and highly regarded HT doctors. And the anesthetic was injected by their associate doctor. I think I saw a page on their website where it said that the price for Sethi and Bansal is higher than the price for their associates. Don't have time to look for it just now... Is it usual that more than one surgeon works on you? I agree it's better to pay more for the best doctors. But I am just wondering what you can expect if you use their cheaper associates. Do the cheaper doctors live up to the clinic's reputation for excellence? Or maybe not.

Thanks for the replies. If we are talking about body hair, which is not as dense as scalp donor hair, I guess it would be easy to visually insert the anesthetic needle where there are gaps between hairs. But on the beard donor area, which is pretty dense, I wonder how they can do that without transecting follicles. Then if you are adding density to an existing transplanted hairline, and doing it over several sessions on consecutive days, I am a bit concerned about poking the same area over and over again each session. Also if one reason for the injections is to limit the bleeding, I guess that's helpful to keep blood from getting everywhere and obscuring visibility, but the newly implanted grafts need blood ASAP. I hope it doesn't limit the blood when it is needed.

So maybe what the delay in growth means is that the body hair telogen phase is longer than that of scalp hair, but the body hair anagen phase for some of us is also longer than the average, enabling your body hair to grow long, and then when it finally falls out, take a long time to regrow.

Particularly with Body Hair Transplant (BHT), there are safety limitations with regard to anesthesia. The body donor area (chest, abdomen) is much larger than the scalp donor area for the same number of grafts. That means that you must use more anesthesia, but that can be dangerous so you must limit the amount of body donor area that can be used in one session. So I wonder if there are alternative anesthesia methods that aren’t as dangerous? Topical? Acupuncture? Would the pain be unbearable without the lidocaine or tolerable? While we’re on the subject, do the needle sticks in your scalp to inject the lidocaine damage follicles?

Dr. Poswal has a different way of extracting body hair grafts that he claims is better than using a punch. He uses a hypodermic needle instead. http://www.e-ijd.org/article.asp?issn=0019-5154;year=2013;volume=58;issue=3;spage=240;epage=240;aulast=Poswal https://hairmedclinics.com/procedure-bht-expliquee-dr-poswal/ What do you think about this? Better or not?

I have noticed that there are a few doctors who have developed a reputation on these transplant websites as being among the very best. But I have also noticed that when you contact these doctors’ clinics, your questions are answered by a different doctor, or perhaps just a technician or salesperson whose job it is to answer internet inquiries. I have seen price lists on a few doctors’ websites and apparently it is a lot more expensive to have your transplant done by the famous doctor, and less money to use one of their “associates” at the clinic. Is that correct? So what do you get if your surgery is performed at a big name doctor’s clinic like Dr. A’s or Eugenix, but not by the famous doctor, rather by a different doctor? Will the surgery be of the same high caliber? Is the associate a person who has been carefully trained by the famous doctor and so is just as skilled? Or maybe some mediocre doctor that the famous doctor hired to work on the cheap?

Also forgot to mention, there is 18% VAT added to the price of all cosmetic surgery in India.

I have been thinking about Dr. Anil Kumar Garg of India as well. He and his surgeon wife, Seema Garg, seem to be well qualified. They are diplomates of the American Board of Hair Restoration Surgery (ABHRS). They had a study published in ISHRS publication Hair Transplant Forum International: https://www.ishrs-htforum.org/content/htfi/28/6/217.full.pdf https://rejuvenatehairtransplant.com/dr-anil-k-garg/ They are experienced and enthusiastic about using body hair. They don’t charge higher price for body hair FUEs than scalp FUEs. Their home page, https://rejuvenatehairtransplant.com, talks about hair transplant prices in India. They are MUCH cheaper than the highly recommended doctors in India. Maybe because they are in Indore, a smaller city, not Delhi or Mumbai. Their practice seems dedicated to native Indians, not to attract richer westerners for medical tourism like the more famous big-city India HT clinics. If you google the clinic “rejuvenate clinic indore”, you will find 348 Google Reviews with an overall score of 4.7 out of 5. I must say that the low price makes me nervous, but the man seems honest and legitimate. With that low price, I can afford to experiment with using a bunch of body hair like stomach and chest and not worry about losing a lot of money if only a small percent of it grows, as many doctors caution about body hair. Right now they are closed because of the virus hysteria, but, assuming they open again, would you think they are a risky option?

Thanks Melvin. Yes, that makes sense. But I think I read somewhere that one doctor who is experimenting with follicle stem cells (Is it Dr. Goh?) has gotten plucked hair to grow when implanted.

That's amazing, BeHappy, and goes counter to what we are usually told. Studies I read said that the body hair usually grows a little longer on the scalp than it did on the body, due to recipient influence. But if your hair is growing longer than your native scalp hair, what is that telling us about anagen phase of body hair? Maybe that it's very variable from person to person and some of us hairy apes have very long anagen phases? You had beard, chest and stomach hairs transplanted, IIRC. I hope one day you will be able to estimate the percentage of these hairs that grew. So many doctors are saying only a very low percent of them grow, beard being the exception.

Really? Even if the plucked hair has the bulb on the end? I don't know where I got the idea that plucking terminates the anagen phase.

My objection to shaving the recipient area prior to surgery is that I don't like the idea of dragging a razor along my scalp because I fear it will irritate the scars and make them grow. When you talk about shaving, do you mean with a razor or does the surgeon clip it with an electric clipper?