Captain Haddock

No such instructions, we know by now it wasn't a serious comment from Dr. Sethi and he merely intended to mock my suffering. Also why the apologies? There's no such rule that you can't comment on older threads - unless someone just made that up out of thin air to silence you.

Pretty shocking that Eugenix still continue to dish out below par, sub standard care to their patients even in the highest level, custom packages. It's a pretty careless hair mill looking to make as much as money/day at this point. What @DeltaV is alluding to when he says "third world country" - is not a take on the country itself, but the standard of care and ethics. You wouldn't have doctors abandoning you on the surgery table in the west. They will get sued. You cannot promise your patients a certain set of surgeons before a cosmetic procedure is booked, and then have some junior techs carry out your job and get away with it. The lack of consumer awareness in India means Eugenix exploits his day in and day out to their advantage (as evidenced by multiple threads) - there's no proper redressal for those who are wronged, except for coming on forums like these and venting.

As someone who suffers from retrograde too, that does look like the nape thinning. It usually thins in the middle and leaves an outline around the edges - I have it to fade it out in my cuts.

I'm sorry to hear this, but I feel this is a complete rip off. I can't help but wonder why you didn't look at Dr. Konior, who happens to charge around the same rate, is one of the best doctors in the world churning out very consistent results, very ethical, above all, he is located in the USA and would've offered you treatment (or rather sound advice) without all the additional noise of having to get a visa, travel etc. In my personal opinion, there are plenty of other talented surgeons who charge far less (Freitas, Cuoto et all), do the entire surgery themselves, and mean nothing but business without the frills of a farmhouse, instagram live etc. This has become rather characteristic with Dr. Sethi it looks like. He completely fails to realise that the patients he couldn't deliver results for are psychologically impacted in a way that cannot be quantified. The last thing someone who has spent $25K, travelled halfway across the world, waited patiently for a year would want is to be accused by the very doctor who was entrusted with this life changing procedure. I can't help but notice that Dr. Sethi spent time talking about trivial matters - such as your posts on some online forum and your supposed intentions instead of addressing your immediate concern and health. You don't seem to be his priority. You've been through quite an ordeal prior to this surgery, you had multiple failed procedures, and the first thing Dr. Sethi should've done is really study your history and your physiology instead of announcing that he would give you full coverage for 12K grafts. You were never a candidate and someone with your best interests would've turned you away instead of making a quick buck off your misery. This case has all the signs of carelessness and irresponsible behaviour, which is very reminiscent of what happened with me. Please don't waste anymore time waiting for something magical to happen, take control of your life, get an SMP and move on. In my opinion, it can be quite lucrative to refuse a procedure that requires 80% BHT work. Such procedures often command high prices. Patients who require BHT tend to have lower expectations, which makes it easier to make a profit. It is not credible to believe that a doctor with thousands of surgeries under their belt would be unable to assess the risks of failure. To me, this situation does not seem like a doctor seeking to test their skills.

Yeah, your gut instincts are true. That certainly looks less than ideal since you're almost at 6 months now. In my opinion a large number of grafts have probably failed to grow. You may experience new growth in the coming months, but for you to be happy with the result you'll need drastic improvement (say, 300% boost in growth rate) in the next couple of months. When I had my HT, months 4, 5 and 6 saw 90-100% of the implanted grafts grow in. There are occasional late bloomers, but there must be some signs of growth. Please do not panic yet, make sure to document your progress well and remember, nothing is worth spoiling your mental health over.

I echo this, although it's rather easy to say that in hindsight. Very sorry to see that it hasn't worked out for you. Several members had already expressed doubts about your candidacy in your original thread. It's understandable when us patients get excited about the possibility of having a head full of hair and jump the gun, but I fail to understand why your doctors didn't educate you about what to expect. You should've been given an objective assessment and advised against a procedure. BHT/beard grafts can never fully replace the illusory quality of your scalp hair. I don't think you had enough in the bank in the first place. A good scalp to BHT ratio would be somewhere around 75:25. Plus, extracting from the beard is a huge trade off as it alters your facial appearance permanently. Some men would dread not being able to grow a beard. It's a double whammy later on if the HT doesn't pay off. I personally don't feel that you were a good candidate, and at 50, you should've simply saved yourself from having to go through this roller coaster ride.

This thread keeps on giving some interesting arguments. From hair follicles magically re-angulating themselves into correct positions, to now me having variable donor density. True or not - they all have one thing in common : to play with the vulnerable psyche of the patient, cause doubt in their natural convictions and eventually leave them to blame their own physiology for their suffering. This sort of behaviour is toxic and borderline criminal in my opinion. @general-etwan has exhibited similar behaviour before in my thread : I did not respond at the time, now I will. 1. This isn't an odd mishandled case by Eugenix. As many others have already noted, several other patients have come forth in their respective threads highlighting poor results, angulations and donor areas. I am not going to list them all out here as my objective is not to bash the clinic whenever I have a chance. 2. You are right when you say "too much was taken from specific areas" : this is because homogenous extraction is a tedious process and Dr. Arika was too lazy to do that on Dec 10th 2020, when she had other patients, like @Wandererind to attend to as I was lying on the surgery table waiting for someone to restart extracting grafts. You have to pump in anaesthesia, wait, extract and then repeat. It needs a doctor who cares about you on your big day. The Eugenix model works on scale, and they simply cannot afford to spend too much time on a single patient. They have a deadline and they have to finish up by then so they can move onto the next patient. The next time I muster the courage to get a fade, I shall make it a point to post them here. It is a difficult experience to sit through a fade as a lot of people get to see the donor bare bones. Plus I have to carry it around to the office. That takes a toll on my mental health. I was a religious patient who trusted his doctors over his own judgement for over a year. I did my duty to make sure nothing was amiss from my end. In fact, arguments similar to the kind you make are the ones that got me. I truly believed that my grafts would just magically realign themselves after a few months. Since then it has dawned on me that clinics often promise miracles to patients they botched to delay the aftermath of an angry patient and limit the blast radius: "the donor is experiencing a shock loss, it'll get better"..."we know it's been 6 months now, but the true magic happens when you hit the 9th month"..."sometimes patients continue to grow hair even after 2 years, so you gotta wait"...we've all heard that before. Add to the mix a bunch of patron patients like @general-etwan, who egg on and cheer from the sidelines, people who are truly victims have no option to believe what is being told to them. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Well, thankfully God has given me good native hair, with some smart planning, I am now camouflaging the the botch up a tad better. I do 1.5 guard on the sides and 1 guard on the transplanted temples and that evens the look from a distance. However, if you get a little close (family, girlfriend) - they can see it. The angulations and thicker follicles stand out in every possible way no matter what you do. This means that when I meet someone new, and they up close, I am very self conscious. As for the donor, I am doing a 2 guard. God forbid this ever happens to someone, they would have to undergo the pain of having to explain the specifics of how the hair should be cut to the barber in front of a bunch of people, and have them wondering why the hell one half of their temple angulates totally opposite to the rest of the area - it's all a huge punishment in itself. Your barbers will remember you. My first priority is to fix my temples, I am currently considering Freitas or Couto, but I haven't gone ahead and sent any comms. Keeping a little busy with life. Perhaps I will the beginning of next year. As a matter of fact, I am looking at the option of getting an SMP - I wonder if that hurts the chances of doing another procedure. I would've probably gone back to them had they been transparent, honest and reasonable in their answers. Their PR/marketing guys are horrible, and by the looks of it they are only relaying what the doctors want them to, as Dr. Sethi has made it clear to @drawdownfx that I'm responsible for the horrible temple results as I "slept on the wrong side of the bed". That is such an arrogant response to give about a patient who is already suffering the ill effects of a sub par HT. Does Dr. Sethi ever consider the mental state of his patients before making such remarks? I would be walking into my grave if I go back to Eugenix. We saw a chain of patients/posts talk about how kind/ethical/moral the doctors are, but in my opinion it all comes down to how they handle a case gone wrong. To their credit they did offer a touch up, but what they didn't do is own up to the mistakes they made in the previous procedure, reason why they happened or what they would do different. Instead their comms are "tell us what you want" - how the hell am I supposed to know what needs to be done to fix my hair? I am not a surgeon. Eugenix barely spent any time on me on the day of my procedure, ruined my donor and temple area, blamed me for my results, and now expect me to walk back in. Yeah, I am must be crazy. Good point made. Don't just go on pictures and someone's experience. This goes back to an earlier post I made - judge how much time the doctor has for YOU and YOUR CASE. All clinics will provide preferential treatment and bonuses to a few patients every year as these patients will now generate positive word of mouth and reputation. It is these people who post on forums and you end up seeing most of the times. Bunch of people on the internet having a great time and a good result /= you having a great time and a good result. Eugenix has a private villa for those who fly in from abroad (also other high profile clients in India), in contrast I received about 10 minutes of attention on the day of my HT. Perhaps what he means is that hair transplant with Eugenix is not for you and those who want a decent donor area.

Well at the time I got the surgery I paid Rs. 120/graft. And yes it did have GST on top of it. I guess prices have changed now.

There's no "growth" in the donor area, and there isn't any chance of growth once the furniture has been disturbed. The pictures I posted were 15 months post surgery. I'm not sure I understand your question right. Once the follicles have been removed, they don't come back, and this is why they have to be removed homogeneously. When done in a haphazard manner, especially with a big punch (like the one eugenix uses), the look lasts you forever. I'm considering an SMP across the donor region soon. I may post results of that.

@BaldingEagle1- I'm sorry I think you're mistaken. What repair are we talking about here?

Lol

There are 883 instances of the word "butchered" being used in this forum. I've come across the word many times in the past, but you must've been the first one to receive a warning for it. Plus, you never called the doctors butchers, just the state of my donor, as @GeneralNorwood earlier pointed out. Someone obviously went out of their way to misrepresent your words so that you may be warned. It seems many people, including me, have been warned on this thread for merely trying to put our opinions forward.

Excellent question. I guess the usual phase for a prospective patient would be to scan through results and lock-in on a clinic, but the most important part would to query and find out if the doctor takes any interest in you at all. Knowing what I know now, I would: 1. Gauge the doctor's interest in my individual case. How much time does the doctor take out to study my case? This could be assessed during your consultations. I had two paid consultations with both the founding surgeons of Eugenix: For the first consultation, I flew out from a different city to meet Dr. Pradeep Sethi. When I got to clinic at the scheduled time, Dr. Sethi briefly greeted me, and then got busy with another patient during my scheduled consultation time. I was made to sit in a room by myself for about 60 minutes, before the receptionist Mr. Imran was sent to provide me company. I spent another 30 minutes with him, being told about how successful the other patient was and about the wealthy companies he owned, essentially implying that he was more important than me at the time. I had a flight to catch after a couple of hours and this is when Dr. Sethi was finally available and spent about 15 minutes with me, before I had to rush. The second consultation was with Dr. Arika, which was supposed to be a video call, but they suffered a connection drop at their end and it was reduced to merely a phone call that lasted about 5 minutes in which nothing substantial could be discussed. Lessons: If your doctor doesn't take much interest in your case nor has enough time to assess you in your consultation, they probably won't have time for you on the day of your surgery either. 2. Gauge the doctor's availability. Find out specifically about how much time the doctor would be spending with you planning the surgery on the day of the procedure. Ask if there are other patients would undergo surgeries on the same day, and if yes, how many? How would the clinic manage resources? What is their contingency plan if certain patients need special focus? Lessons: Most of us presume that our surgeons would be completely available to us on our most important day, but this is a big mistake. 3. Surgery Plan. Have you been given a solid surgery plan before you commit? How detailed is this plan? A plan doesn't mean a few lines drawn on pictures you sent over email. Find out how the hairline is going to be implanted, how many rows of singles, your temples, your donor. Everything. Does the doctor take your future into consideration? It's almost like a job interview. I think it really depends on how you would define a clinic. Is a clinic a business or a medical practice? As a medical practice scaling isn't going to help patients one bit. It isn't a good feeling to know that the doctor has other patients on their mind whilst you are laying on the operating table. Scaling is a strict no-no for me from a patient perspective. But this doesn't mean that doctors or clinics can't make money, they simply have to set a premium price on the work they do. A lot of clinics haven't scaled in Europe and the USA. They are run by a single primary surgeon. But at the same time we live in market economy and the cosmetic industry is a lucrative business. Clinics have all the freedom in the world to scale and churn out surgeries. Bad cases can be handled well if you have the right marketing agency and PR team in place. The question is, what are you, as a patient going to choose? I don't find this to be accurate. The number of packages Dr. Arika was involved in at the time of my surgery was 1. Now it is 2+. Additional packages ensure that a larger pie of the market is accessible to Eugenix. You now have hierarchy in the organisation with junior/senior techs and doctors and a wide variety of skill sets thus introducing more variability and uncertainty in your HT. This is something I personally wouldn't want as a patient.

You did no wrong, trust me. The last thing HT patients should do is blame themselves after not getting the care they deserved. You might think that a higher package must mean better results but no, I've had the founding surgeon do my donor extraction and it hasn't turned out good either.

This is more so because I already came with a great set of existing hair with thick characteristics and has nothing do with the surgery. The temple on the right side only had 143 grafts implanted into it over my existing, thinning temple. I wish you all the best for your procedure bro

First of all I'd like to thank you for reaching out to me, it's always good to see when clinics reach out to their patients and see to it that they're truly happy. When I chose Eugenix I was really proud of my decision, and I believe to this day that your founding surgeons are talented. But I disagree with a lot of your practices, which I believe eventually led to me having a sub par result. Below I'd like to respond to some of your comments: What if the natural angulation (such as in my case), is forward facing? Wouldn't this defy basic common sense and HT 101 practices such as following direction of the patient's native hair? In one of the educative videos published on your official YouTube channel, Dr Sethi clearly outlines the guiding principles of temple HT and says that temple transplants are a very customized job. He also also states that if these rules aren't followed, the result would be catastrophic. In my case, the angles weren't flat to the skin, the choice of hair was all over the place, and the angulation was 100% wrong. None of these principles were followed as the lead surgeon was clearly overloaded with work on the day of my surgery. I specifically requested for a meeting with the surgeon on the eve of my procedure, however I was told that I would have the meeting on the next day. It was only after I changed into my surgery clothes did I even get to see Dr. Arika, and she was done with my design in next 5-10 minutes. The bottomline is that apart from merely drawing a line around my preexisting hairline, there was no actual plan. The donor zones were not marked. The temples weren't discussed. Even the techs did not know what kind of hair to implant until I was laying face down on operating table. The horrible, haphazard and logic defying temple work has resulted in me having so many awkward social encounters. I've had people walk beside me and look at my temples ask what was wrong with them. I've had barbers stop their work and ask me if there was some sort of surgery done on my head. I've literally had to change the way I sit around people, always facing them towards my right to have them not come across my temple work. Something that I notice to this day is the continuous justification of the design choice, or the lack thereof. Why is it so hard to admit that this was a design error? I've not met one person on this forum, or otherwise who would say that my temple work was aesthetic. Since my procedure I've come across so many other cases on this forum who have suffered the same fate on their frontal zones and on their temples. Why sacrifice quality over quantity? The Eugenix drivers who picked me up at the airport told me that about 150 surgeries were being executed at the Gurgaon center alone every month. I understand it may be a business/investor led decision but you have to draw a line somewhere. It's probably why Eugenix doesn't really have a waiting list like a Dr Zarev or a Dr Couto. I was dissatisfied with the look 10 days post surgery and my concerns are well documented on this forum. Nothing else has contributed to my current look. I understand. My expectations were in line. I would've been okay with 70% similarity but right now they are nowhere close to that mark. Not even the directions are similar. Characteristics come next. The temple work stands out in all possible ways. I don't agree with this at all. I've attached a picture of a patient who has had over 2.6K grafts removed and his donor looked untouched. Moreover, I'm sure you have had your own share of premium patients travelling from the west who got great donor work done as well. I've attached a picture for comparison. During my surgery, we had two phases of extraction. They were very arbitrary and non uniform. After the first session, I found myself waiting on my surgery table along with the techs in the room for Dr. Arika to begin the second phase. We waited for about 45 minutes. I didn't know where my surgeon was. Neither did the techs. They started giving me massages to keep me busy. I was even told that Dr. Shishir would be able to extract the grafts to keep the surgery going, but I insisted that I had chosen the package that comes with Dr. Arika's work on my donor. It was only when I posted my surgery details on this forum did @Wandererind message me and tell me that he had a consultation with Dr. Arika at exactly at the same day, same time. It is beyond me as to why my doc would abandon me and attend to someone else who is looking to consult mid-way through the surgery. I felt abandoned during a life changing procedure. All this adds up, after all surgeons are humans. As the work load increases, they are bound to lose concentration, make mistakes, or in my case, over-harvest a part of my donor. If you carefully look at my donor pictures, the surgery started off with spaced out extraction, but as time passed, I had to be rushed. Thank you for your private message and for the offer of a touch up. This is what good clinics do. Had this been a surgical error, I would have happily agreed. But this was not a problem of lack of talent, ability, or bad circumstances. This was lack of standard of care. This was about being lazy. And I've seen many such cases in the recent past on this forum. And for those reasons, I am choosing not to go back to Eugenix. This is however, not a call for others to have a swing at the clinic or cancel their bookings. This is just an educative post to my fellow forum members on how things can go wrong even if you have done your bit as a patient. P.S It has come to my attention that the moderator of this forum has been removing pictures of good examples of donor extraction and temple work cited in this post, and a previous post by another user. These are cases the authors have posted publicly on this forum for others to see. There are also plenty of pictures cross referenced by others on various topics on all over this forum. I would be happy to provide links to these threads if someone is interested.

There is indeed nothing more tragic than that my friend. I spent two whole years reading about HTs, avoiding clinics that weren't too well known assuming that they knew nothing about angulations or donor management. I waited, and signed up for Eugenix after 2 separate consultations only to fall victim to the very same things that I feared the most. It's simple. HTs can't be reduced to a haircut session. I could probably say that my barber spent more time looking at my hair than my surgeon before a transplant. I simply feel you need to properly study your patients head and hair characteristics for a while before you operate on them. Dr. Arika had a look at my head for a maximum of 10 minutes but this was more about hairline design eg where do we draw the lines etc. TBH It's unfortunately the business model they follow that limits them from completely committing to a patient fully - she has to juggle between multiple patients throughout the day and distribute her time. 10 minutes with patient A, another 10 minutes with patient B and so forth. When you have a situation like this and she still has to complete 100% extraction for me, you can't spread them out obviously. Because more spread = more anesthesia = more time. A lot of clinics in India (who juggle between multiple patients) for this reason keep the extraction area small because they have to be done with the patient quickly. Was told the same thing when I was paranoid about my temples post surgery. The angulations made zero sense. Since then we've seen more cases where the angles clearly took a hit for other patients on their temples and for some right on their frontal zones, and they're being passed around this forum like its absolutely normal. This is very much true, but at the time when I got my surgery done there were only 3 packages and I chose the middle one. It was still the package where the founder docs would perform extraction and crucial implantation. I do believe that they are truly talented surgeons, and that given my case, barely NW2, great hair characteristics, virgin donor, they should've knocked it out of the park. Yet those are probably the very same reasons why my case wasn't given the due attention and operated on rather casually without much thought. It's painful to know that your surgeon has the skill to do so much more, but for some reason did not put in the effort for you, and those skills are exclusively reserved for those who choose better packages. This isn't an anomaly it's just lack of standard of care. I would understand anomalies in context of each patient's growth timelines or results, but a botched donor or bad angles is just a careless job.

Got a fade cut today and it's interesting to note how bad my extraction looks. At the time I got the surgery I was under the impression that it was a shock loss and a lot of people affirmed but it seems like my donor wasn't operated on carefully. Especially when you're just 1.4K grafts down. It shouldn't really look like this.

You have a glorious beard (still). I think the extraction has gone too close to the jawline, and hence the thinning. You could grow it at length and then that would camouflage it. I don't think it's going to grow back as you have had extractions around the area. Personally, I would be against the idea of implanting beard hair or body hair on my scalp and as they are very different in texture. This should've been assessed properly at design stage. Some people get away with BHT as their scalp hair has similar texture or their BHT hair to scalp hair ratio is low. If it is taking too much of your mental strength, I would recommend a good SMP and growing out your beard bud.

I never made any comments about what you should or should not do. All I did was simply post my opinion about how the forum works and you're already talking about quitting my thread, your full-time job and civil discourse.

A lot of people have messaged me in the last few days regarding my temples. I'll try to answer some of those questions here to educate patients. To those wondering why I haven't raised this issue with the clinic, I raised it 10 days post op and the clinic's official response can be seen in page 2 of this thread. The essence of the response was that the grafts would re-angulate themselves into oblique or slanting angles after a few months - this was something that never made sense to me and after 15 months, it factually never happened. Over the last year I've come to realize that temple reconstruction is a very customized job that needs good time spent on studying the patient's head, his needs and extensive discussion. All of that cannot happen as soon as you land in the clinic and now you have your procedure scheduled for the day. The time I spent discussing my procedure on site, with the doctors and techs at Eugenix in the planning and photography room was approximately less than 30 minutes. 10 of those minutes were probably spent discussing my temples. Moreover, patients also need to be educated that there are economics and time constraints on the clinic's end (not just Eugenix, but plenty of clinics that operate on multiple patients a day). Hair transplantation is a lucrative business, and the clinic can't afford to spend more than a day on you, while arguably there is a lesser chance of haphazard implantation and poor planning with doctors who work on a single patient/day, addressing hairline/mid-scalp on the first day, and then the temples on the second day etc. When I was being operated upon at Eugenix, the techs told me that there were 2 more patients who were undergoing procedures at the same time. Then there is also the problem of difference in skill difference between the techs that operate on you. You'd have plenty of them working on you, and it takes just one tech to fumble his part of the job and his mistakes will stick out and haunt you for the rest of your life - like I have to deal with constantly hiding my left temple, by growing out my hair, and styling them like I've never styled them for the last 25 years. One last thing. I'd try and take Melvin (or any other moderator's opinion on any forum) with a pinch of salt as they are financially compensated by clinics to be on the platform, and mods will always strike a balance between clinic PR and patient advocacy, and his reply above is a classic example of the same.

I was very tempted to do this when I had my procedure too. I wanted to just undo the whole temples and I had trouble sleeping - but trust me - DO NOT TAMPER WITH THE GRAFTS NOW. You will have to weather through the storm for a few months, you will get a lot of weird looks and questions from friends/barbers, but once they grow a certain length nobody will be able to tell. The down side is that you will never be able to trim your hair down. Look at my pictures.

Maz, I remember you posting something similar on my thread a year ago when I was worried about the angulations on my left temple. It's been 15 months. The temple angulations don't change nor follow the natural angles after maturity. They need to be implanted correctly from the get go.

@trek Unfortunately my left temple angulations were done in a similar fashion, totally against the natural angulations and the explanation offered was that the angles would realign themselves after a few months but that never happened. I can't do buzz cuts anymore. However it can be camouflaged well when grown out. The dark patches at the end of one or your temples is the resultant of some double grafts being implanted there, possibly because they ran out of singles. In such cases techs usually dissect the double into a single and then implant them. In your case unfortunately, it doesn't look like they did that. Some doubles seem to be have been mixed with the singles and hence the appearance.