Berba11

How on earth you’ve managed to decipher that handwriting I’ll never know. I can’t even make half of it out *after* you’ve transcribed it! Good work!

The OP also mentioned possible ‘popping’, which may mean he was oozing a fair bit during surgery and in order to negate popping, they had to work a little more slowly and allow the oozing to subside. That, plus the multiple strips (which is very odd indeed), could certainly account for a longer, slower surgery.

At 51 your hair loss will be a lot slower and more stable. If you do lose more hair then you may have to chase it down with more surgery but that's the trade off. If your donor resources allow for it then it shouldn't be a problem. Oral minoxidil would be better than topical (and less hassle), and you can save yourself the money in spending on PRP - it's not going to do anything, frankly. No harm in taking Saw Palmetto, Biotin and other supplements. Whether it'll actually help your hair is another matter of course.

I'm not sure you've understood what I was suggesting you seek consultation about: I'm saying you could have all of those grafts from the front punched back out again and placed elsewhere on your head (including back into your donor area), essentially resetting you to where you started (albeit with an emptier wallet). If you then wanted to just move on and allow your hair loss to progress however it will, then so be it. Here's a case in which a HT was totally reversed and the grafts put back into the donor to mask an FUT scar: And here's another ongoing case of something very similar: As for future hair loss... Have you considered taking finasteride?

There's a reason that none of the top clinics offer this. There's no good evidence that it is effective and frankly, to be upsold something mid-surgery is ethically dubious. How old are you?

As far as I can tell, you've got both singles and irregularities there, which is good. We still won't know for sure until things really start to grow out but I don't think you have anything to worry about for now. The lower cost Turkish clinics are a bit of a lottery. We see very decent results and we see very poor results and it's sometimes hard to know which way it will go for a patient but I'd say from what I can see that things look promising for you.

Hi mate, sorry you're going through this. A few thoughts: Doesn't remotely look like 2,800 grafts for the hairline work Lots of grafts that are far too thick in the hairline and it all lacks the kind of soft, natural-looking refinements we'd hope to see. Luckily most lay people won't really know the difference Skin has definitely been irritated by those grafts one way or the other - possibly cobblestoning as you suspect Overall it's not great work, but its far from the worst case to ever pass through this forum The good news is that this would be fixable. Those implanted grafts can be punched back out and even put back into the areas of your donor that you feel are most compromised. Usually punching the grafts out will also help improve or even eliminate the cobblestoning. The bad news is that these kind of repairs are quite a bit more expensive than normal surgery - expect to pay more for the fix than the initial surgery - and can often require two or three sessions to get everything out and then get everything looking soft and natural again. The number of outstanding surgeons for this kind of repair work is a little limited. I'd recommend reaching out to Dr Feriduni in Belgium, Dr Bisanga (also Belgium) and Dr Laura & Sever at Hattingen for consultation/evaluation. If you're in the UK I'd also suggest a visit to Dr Ball at the Maitland clinic in Portsmouth. EDIT: Also, rather than shave off the offending corner grafts, you might find a better solution that doesn't expose the cobblestoning is to pluck out the most offensive grafts in an irregular pattern to create a bit of break-up. Definitely do not go back to this clinic for any more work though!

This is unfair to not just Tommy, but other patients who have undergone surgery and felt short changed or as though something is not right. Ultimately we put our faith and trust in the hands of surgeons; we defer to their expertise. Even in situations where maybe as a patient we're not quite sure about something, it's easy to become overly deferential in such an environment and go along with something that in hindsight we shouldn't have. Of course, we'd all like to think that we ourselves would pipe up if something seemed wrong. But until you're in that situation you never truly know and the only true antidote to such issues is to have a very thorough and detailed planning consultation in which every single participant of the surgical process is privy to.

It's much better that they left the recession points to be more natural and mature. One of the indicators of poor work out of Turkey is the sloping angles that many clinics often create in the temple corners, which is unnatural and odd looking. From the pictures you've shared, there's nothing that stands out as being an immediate concern. The devil of course will be in the detail. What you're going to want to see is soft single hair grafts used along the hairline, with lots of irregularities to create a bit of break-up and extra softness and naturalness, as well as proper angulation and direction. At this stage we can't know if they've done that (a better picture of the hairline post op would be more instructive here), so it's a waiting game. Clinics like Este tend to be perfectly adequate at transplanting hair from A to B and getting it to grow in. Where most of these low cost Turkish clinics tend to fail is with the level of care and refinement needed to make everything look as natural as possible. Until we see the results we won't know how refined the hairline work has been done.

I think any attempts to conceal rather than embrace hairloss are always doomed to failure. You just create more problems for yourself in the long run. I’d put hats, combovers, SMP and (maybe controversially) hair systems in the same category to be honest. I’m not a fan of any of them. I’d add a caveat around people that have had a bad HT surgery and feel forced to cover it up until they can get it resolved, but that’s a different situation with different considerations.

Qutub Minar is cool - I went there a couple days before my first surgery. You can also take a day trip (or stay one night to make life easier) to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort etc... Personally if you're wanting to explore a little bit, I think you'd be better off doing it in the days prior to surgery rather than after so that you're not swollen and walking around with a funny looking surgical cap. But if that's no big deal to you then there's plenty to see and do!

Fantastic results Tommie. The naturalness is as good as it gets!

Fair enough. It’s borderline impossible to find hairs from anywhere else on the scalp that are as fine and soft as native temple point hairs. This means there will always be some kind of contrast between transplanted hairs and native hair in that area, especially at buzzcut length. When things are grown out everything blends very naturally however, which is true for HT’s in general - a bit of length helps everything! Obviously the hairs selected need to be soft singles, and the angle and direction has to be nice and flush to the scalp to help the blending process. Lots of surgeons do temple points, though many only do subtle enhancements rather than full reconstruction of the temple points.

I'm curious why you're asking to be honest. I've been following your other threads and it's highly debatable whether you yourself are a candidate for surgery. If you do proceed with a modest surgery, you certainly won't have the luxury of addressing your temple points. So if that's why you're asking, I think you're barking up the wrong tree to be frank with you.

You have a lot of hair to keep and this is where you might benefit most from finasteride & minoxidil. If I were you I’d probably give 0.5-1mg per day of finasteride a go in combination with 2.5mg of oral minoxidil for a good 12-18 months and see what progress you’ve made. You’ll want to see either evidence of hair loss being stabilised or evidence of regrowth/improvement of miniaturised hair (or both!). Assuming the medical intervention is showing signs of being successful, you then have the option of enhancing everything with a HT, or maybe deciding that you’re happy with the medical progress alone and sidestep surgery for the time being. In the meantime you could seek consultation which the clinic, who will be best placed to answer your questions.

Things are healing up nicely. How long do you have to wait before your second round of punch outs? Obviously you'll need to have the ones that have started to poke through punched out as well. You're dead right about how removing these grafts hasn't had any negative cosmetic impact on the overall appearance. I've made the point before on this forum that simply having enough of a hairline to frame the face is 1000x more important that having a low or aggressive hairline. Often less is more and I think that can be very true with HT's.

Funnily enough I've literally just suggest Melvin try to get some examples of this type of work from Hattingen for the podcast and here you are...! Hairline definitely looks softer already will some of those grafts removed and bit more break-up and irregularity manufactured. How much do they charge for these punch-outs?

Melvin, I know Dr Sever has been on some other podcasts/YT channels recently and has talked a lot about hairline extraction repairs (I think they're doing two or three per week sometimes as I recall). If there's an opportunity for some "show and tell" like you did with Dr Zarev of such cases, I think that would be brilliant. More and more people will require such repairs in the years to come, so having some more publicly available cases will help us all to make recommendations to prospective patients about who is doing the best work in this area. The case Dr Zarev shared was a bit of a world exclusive in that respect - we'd never seen examples of such work from him previously (ditto the temple points!), which is why I asked those questions in the thread you posted in advance of the show (I'd like to think my username helped!). I don't actually think we've seen any cases from Hattingen in this area either even though they've spoken a lot about it and clearly do this work regularly.

Definitely not 3,000 grafts implanted (how many were extracted is another issue entirely). You should be able to count them. Please do name the clinic who performed this surgery on you.

The results certainly look nice here but I do think maybe we need some higher standards for presentation when a clinic posts their results going forward. The immediate post op work looks immaculate and from the results photos, it just looks like a bloke with a nice full head of hair. That much is certainly clear. Some more detail of the areas of the hairline that were reconstructed and comb-through pictures that really showcase the areas of the scalp transplanted into however would tell us more (not just here but in all cases).

He may still have a gig at WMG but his entire Instagram over the last couple of months has been dedicated to showcasing the development of his own surgery. I literally talked to him about it about 5 weeks ago. In any case, it doesn’t really matter. WMG’s email remains generic whether a good surgeon works there or not. As good as Miln seems to be, I’ve never seen a traction alopecia case by him. Worth a consultation definitely but for such a case Dr Ball would probably be the best and most experienced option.

He’s gone solo now.

That’s just generic advise from a group that shouldn’t really be on your list. You’ve already got appointments/made contact with the some of the best hair restoration surgeons in the UK (Ball, Mani and Miln) - see what they say. In-person consults will be more instructive than pictures of course. Obviously you may have to visit a tricho specialist as well. I know seeking multiple consultations is a pain in the backside and you may at first start getting conflicting information, but you can see now why in your case it’s really important to get proper assessments from the best guys rather than rush off to Turkey on the cheap. Let us know what Dr Mani thinks and definitely try to get an appointment with Dr Ball. Dr Ball has a lot of female HT cases so is probably the most experienced UK surgeon you can speak to on this.

Just a correction here... It was Lupanzula who fixed Kyle's HT, not Feriduni. But yea, Kumari and these other cowboys are no go. Speaking of which: Dr Feriduni in Belgium and Dr Laura & Dr Sever at Hattingen would be worth speaking to. To be honest there's loads of top doctors in Europe and everyone can give you a list of their favourites but you're best off using the Forum Recommended list at the top of the page, clicking through a few options and looking at their patient/photo gallery (you can filter for female HT cases).