Berba11

How many grafts are all of these clinics proposing? And where are you based?

Personally I wouldn't go to Turkey. On a tight budget I'd be heading to Thailand for Dr Loarwong, Dr Ratchathorn or Dr Pathomvanich. Dr Bicer is probably your best bet in Turkey these days.

You’ll be fine. Enjoy your holiday & good luck with the surgery!

11 hours ago, Danilo Costamagna said:

ah ah, still italian, just leaving to long in norway. I think it will be more fair for clinic to eventually discuss the result after one year right ?

Not really. The forum works best on the basis of transparency and it’s more beneficial to patient’s if clinics/surgeons are named. 
 

Also, suppose you have an amazing result but don’t end up posting here for the full 12 months… We’ll never know who it was and your surgeon won’t get the recognition they deserve. 
 

As for the work, I like the conservative hairline design and think this could potentially be a really nice transformation for you if the work is as refined and artistic as it should be. 

Congratulations Dr B, and apologies about the weather here! 😅

11 minutes ago, FLEngineer said:

Gonna have to disagree on the obscurity aspect, anyone who goes to YouTube or Google and looks up hair transplants will be hit with videos and forums about verteporfin.

And again, that's why I said I'm going to ask for patient contact info so I can verify with them too.  It's really not so crazy that a clinic is willing to meet a customers request.

Firstly, I said *the clinic* was relatively obscure. It’s not even remotely one of the most popular or well know clinics in Turkey, let alone across the online HT community that generally have a higher standard and knowledge of the hair restoration marketplace. 
 

Secondly, it’s objectively not true that anyone looks up HT’s will come across Verteporfin. What exactly would you have to Google to stumble across it? I’ve just done multiple generic search term’s around HT’s into Google & YT and I’ve no come across anything related to Verteporfin. Bear in mind the algorithms are *more likely* to give me niche results given my use of this forum and HT related content I watch on YT. For the average prospective patient, they will get the most generic search results possible. 
 

Now add all of that together and what you don’t equal is a fairly obscure hair mill in Turkey secretly having multiple patients requesting and getting Verteporfin treatment (itself completely novel at this stage). 
 

Like I said, it doesn’t add up. I’ll hold my hands up if there’s evidence to the contrary of course, but I think you’ll hit a lot of dead ends trying to speak to all these alleged Verteporfin patients.

6 minutes ago, FLEngineer said:

The rep said they had other patients request it, and when I sent a picture of the name brand Visudyne drug, he confirmed that's what they used.  I'm hoping to ask if they can give me the patients contact information to verify today since I was very surprised by this as well.  It's a hospital, so they do have access to every drug I suppose.

This sounds highly unlikely. The number of HT patients who even know what Verteporfin is is minuscule - largely confined to here, Reddit and probably a few YT channels. 
 

Then when you think about how many from that tiny pool would be choosing this particular clinic - who are fairly obscure - the chances of multiple patients passing through and asking about or having vert used on them is beyond tiny. We’d surely have heard about this from patients themselves. And unless the clinic are very actively looking at vert themselves (and there’s absolutely no indication they are), then I’m not sure what basis they’d have for even agreeing to the request. 
 

None of it adds up. 

16 hours ago, FLEngineer said:

The representative I spoke with said they've done it many times as well with other patients

But the way, I forgot to query this… Am I misunderstanding, or are you saying that the rep from this hair mill told you they’ve administered Verteporfin many times for their other HT patients? Because that’s obviously not true at all if he said that. 

3 hours ago, Ice_man said:

Dr Basinga was the only who said no. With everyone saying yes that gave me the false impression that it was doable. 

With every consultation my main question was; Is my donor hair good and plentiful? and the answer was always yes. 

After Dr Basinga said no then I decided to post on here to get some independent views and thoughts.

Dr Bisanga is an outstanding and experienced surgeon, but he is somewhat known for straight up rejecting patients. That's no bad thing, and it's not a criticism at all, but I reckon Dr Pittella or Dr Zarev would take a different view as these are the kinds of difficult and large cases they've built their reputation's on.

But the point is that your options really are limited to maybe no more than 3 or 4 excellent surgeons who can handle cases like yours, and it's going to cost significantly more than £6K to get you the kind of result you want. If the costs of going to one of the few surgeons that can handle your case are too great, then that's no bad thing either - at least you can move on knowing it's out of the question. As @Bandit90says, no harm in taking some consultations in the meantime to get a more thorough assessment with the select few surgeons best suited to dealing with your needs.

3 minutes ago, Rasputin said:

I'll let you know if you want how mine went, I also paid the previous standard consultation price and mine is tomorrow.

I'd be very keen to hear about it, and I'm sure others would as well.

58 minutes ago, Rasputin said:

Does it mean that in your case you'll get the 5 euros / graft price for your surgery ?

My consultation isn’t until next year so I don’t know, but I’d expect that price to be honoured. 

56 minutes ago, FLEngineer said:

I personally 10 people that went here and had great results so I think this is perfect for me.

I know, but you’ll forgive my scepticism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people wax lyrical over a result, and then when I’ve looked at the result myself I can see several common issues with it. 
 

I assume you thought the results you were seeing from the clinic that did you dirty the first time around were good, too. I’d hate for you to make the same error twice, and if you do roll the dice here I hope it works well for you. 
 

With vert, personally I’d wait a little longer and use a surgeon that has been working with it and for whom there will be a more robust follow up and measurement protocol. Obviously there aren’t many options right now, but the landscape will surely have changed in that regard 12-18 months from now. 

5 minutes ago, FLEngineer said:

n that case, I will take my verteporfin regenerated donor area and pay the premium to get a perfect hairline

You have no idea if verteporfin will achieve what you hope it will achieve, and you’re putting verteporfin in the hands of a clinic that haven’t been participating in or using the formula previously, which is a pretty big variable when it comes to administering V and getting the optimal possible outcome from it. 
 

For someone who doesn’t have a good track record in selecting a reputable clinic to perform surgery on their head, I’m quite perplexed by your blasè attitude here to be honest. 

48 minutes ago, FLEngineer said:

Yes, they are a cheap hair mill, but…

And what are you going to do when you end up with a linear, pluggy and unnatural looking hairline that draws people’s eye?

Hair mills don’t just risk a patient’s donor… They also leave people with dodgy hairlines. 
 

It’s your head though at the end of the day. 

1 hour ago, Ice_man said:

Thank you for being comprehensive - I have only been looking HT for a week after seeing a neighbour get one done in Turkey and seeing his results.

I have had a few quotes:

FUE clincs ~ £6250

Wimpole Clinic ~ £6300

Dr Mohammed Ditta (Harley St HT) - £6000

Farjo ~ £12k

MYWHTC ~£10k

I will have a look at you recommendations. I had assumed it would be around the £6k mark as that what majority were quoting.

Seems like I need to do more research...

Farjo & Mwamba are the only ones from that list that I would remotely consider. Wimpole have a poor reputation and the others are unknown quantities as far as I'm aware.

Have Farjo and Mwamba said how many grafts they expect to get?

6 minutes ago, Ice_man said:

@Berba11 I am 37 and probably looking at around the £6k mark for which I have been quoted a few times.

During the consultation I do tell them that I am not after a full coverage but enough to improve the front & mid-scalp with some sort of coverage at the back. 

Who would you recommend for this type of procedure?

 

Who have you consulted with so far? £6K sounds very cheap. In order to get you the frontal third and midscalp coverage needed, as well as address the crown at least a bit, you'd ideally need a minimum of 4,000 grafts and anything you can get above that number from scalp, beard or both would be a great benefit. FUT rather than FUE might be your friend here as well (or a combination of both). 4000 grafts into £6,000 = £1.5 per graft. I don't know exactly how much each of the best clinics in the UK charge, but most of them charge decently more than that, so I'm a bit concerned you might be speaking with the wrong clinics (or you're getting a bargain from one of the up and comers!).

For your level of hair loss, reduced donor and age I think you'd need to speak with Pittella and Hattingen. Both will blow your budget out of the water, but both are excellent and known for their ability to do very large sessions. Others will recommend Zarev, but again, budget + the 3 year waiting list just for a consultation probably isn't going to fly I imagine!

On the budget-friendly end of the spectrum, you have good options in Thailand who have experience with higher NW cases. You also have Eugenix in India; we've seen planning issues in a number of results and patient testimonials as they've grown their operation quite considerably, but at their best they do produce some of the most radical and transformative high NW cases you'll find anywhere.

I think as a minimum you want to get as many consultations from some or all of the surgeons best known for their work on high NW cases and gather as much info and as many ideas about what's possible for you as you can.

3 hours ago, Ice_man said:

Do you guys think I would be a good candidate for hair transplant?

A candidate? Probably, depending on which surgeon's hands you place yourself in and what your expectations and goals are. A good candidate? Probably not as you've got a lot of thinning in the donor area quite high up on the sides - advanced retrograde alopecia - and a lot of scalp to cover up top.

How old are you and what is your budget for this? If you want full coverage you have very limited options, however if you're just looking to improve the frontal third and some of the midscalp and compromising further back, you've liekly got many good options.

We have a lot of Dr Pittella cases on the forum and no misses as far as I know. But obviously not every case a surgeon performs ends up on here and we're all beholden to the willingness and helpfulness of patients to share their experiences for us all to judge and assess.

But it's impossible for any surgeon to have a 100% success rate. For that to happen, they'd have to have parts per million manufacturing "tolerances" better than Silicon Valley/Apple computers (99.99%). The best any of us can do is mitigate risk.

Remember that a poor result is not always down to the surgeon. Even the most highly controlled experimental conditions yield unexplained phenomena, and HT surgery on different patients with different scalps, hair type, age, health etc means that many variables cannot be known.

It's not uncommon, but it will clear up in due time with the treatments that have been prescribed.

Who was your surgeon/clinic?

4 minutes ago, jason231 said:

So is eugenix off the table now? whos left for high NW/high graft clincs?

They're certainly not off the table - they have been and still are responsible for some of the best transformations you'll find anywhere. But I think it's a major advantage to know a lot about HT's and to have a clear and realistic plan for yourself prior to going to Eugenix in order to maximise your chances of a good result. We know that planning can often be very fast or barely existing, that complicated cases can sometimes be treated as being easier than they are and that communication wise, the left hand sometimes doesn't know what the right hand is doing. These are things to bear in mind with Eugenix as it's a big organisation with a lot of moving parts now, whereas a few years ago it was just Dr Arika and Dr Pradeep as a tag team duo and you'd get the best of both of them with full attention and oversight.

Other great higher NW clinics are Pittella, Zarev, Hattingen, H&W. Really any top doctor that knows how to manage donor areas and utilise as many resources as possible, such as FUT, beard or other body hair etc... will do a good job on higher NW cases, but certainly the three I mentioned there are known for their expertise in larger sessions.

44 minutes ago, FaganBecker said:

HLC seem very confident they can clean this up easily and give me a result that will “make me happy”

 

but they also seem very reluctant to give any information about how his will work until I book and go back in person.

 

they have said that they can do punch outs and moving multiple grafts, but they told me that in a 5 word text. It seems a little too much like, stop asking questions just trust us! 

I would do two things in your situation:

1. Strongly request to speak with one of the HLC doctors as you want more information in advance - in particular about punching out multi graft hairs. If they're happy to do this then that's a positive. But you really need more information up front than a five word text message

2. In the meantime, speak to a couple of other surgeons who do repairs just to get other ideas and eyes on your case

They key here is to not rush or do anything too hastily or without good information in advance.

1 hour ago, FaganBecker said:

however, you seem to doubt that the removal of grafts falls within their field of expertise? Do you?

On the basis that I’ve never seen any such case from them, never heard anyone have this done with them and that they seemingly haven’t talked about this with you. In fact, it’s extremely rare for any clinic in Turkey to do hairline punch outs. Most people who get hairline punch outs do so because they went to Turkey the first time around! Unfortunately Turkey is the place that people tend to get botched - the repair job will usually be somewhere more expensive in Europe. 

14 minutes ago, FaganBecker said:

Part of me does just want to let the people who I’ve always paid £8K to make good on their initial promise. A natural hairline. 
 

but I agree. At this stage, it is more complicated then just adding singles at the front and a slight softening of the temple angle 

Yes, I get that fully. Repairs are tricky - no two cases are ever quite the same - and, conflictingly, sometimes the very worst HT's are the easiest to fix, whereas decent HT's (in terms of density etc), can be trickier to fix.

6 minutes ago, FaganBecker said:

I think the thing I find tricky here is the idea of removing healthy multiple grafts would obviously thin it out a bit, and particularly on the left side the density is already poor. There are very few lightings in which it doesn’t look very sparse. 

The punch-outs would be re-used and placed into areas of weaker density, but even if you go down the HLC repair route, you're going to be using a) probably 200-400 singles hairs and softer doubles to recreate a new hairline and b) you're still going to have weaker areas that need to be addressed behind the hairline at some point in time (which HLC will probably do for you, to be fair).

8 minutes ago, FaganBecker said:

What do you think of the result so far? A glaringly unnatural result, or something that looks fine if you don’t look to closely at the line itself?

To me it looks poor but I'm not a HT laymen so I'm casting a more critical eye than the man on the street. Also different lighting will exaggerate or mask the issues. Personally I would not be happy with this outcome and I'd want to get the pluggy grafts removed and irregularities added for a more natural result without lowering the hairline further. But I understand that this comes with an unanticipated cost (I'm in a similar boat!).

What it's worth bearing in mind is that the HLC repair is not guaranteed to be a success. If you end up not happy with the repair then you've compounded the problem even further by having the hairline lowered. A good example of this is @Tommy1991. He had bad work initially, went to a reputable clinic for a fix, didn't get fixed and essentially just ended up with more grafts to be extracted later, and is now undergoing a total hairline removal at much bigger costs, time, hassle and worry than the initial work. These things can dominate a person's life for quite a while until they are resolved for good, so I understand how conflicted you probably feel right now.

Personally I don't think you need to go down the Tommy/Feriduni full hairline removal and start over approach. But equally I'm not massively convinced that bringing down your hairline another half cm with HLC is ideal either. The Hattingen 'partial removal'/create some softer breakup option that RTC underwent might be a nice middle of the road option that wouldn't cost the earth. At the very least, speak with Dr Sever and get his thoughts.

24 minutes ago, FaganBecker said:

Sorry for the delay! Appreciate your response. Reassuring for sure. 
 

galling to know I may have another trip to Turkey with little over a year after my first one. 
 

just hoping it’s in their skill set to remove grafts from the front. I think mine looks kind of oddly low at the front wouldn’t you say?

 

it’s improved somewhat, but kind help but think it looks very far from natural 

In the absence of a clear plan from HLC I'd personally have reservations about going back to them.

I also think that camouflaging the multi graft hairline by lowering the hairline is probably ill-advised in your case as your hairline is already quite low. You'd run the risk of having hairs attached to your frontalis muscle which is bit no-no.

What your hair line needs is more irregularities and more singles. You can actually achieve this by reverse engineering the hair line, so to speak. Dr Sever from Hattingen does this - extracts a load of multi's in a broken up, 'irregular' fashion and add a few strategic singles. It's something I'm strongly considering doing myself with Hattingen (I don't have multi's like you do, but my hairline does lack irregularities), and we have a really nice result from @RTCrecently that shows what can be achieved. I'd suggest having a look at @RTC's thread and reaching out to Dr Sever for a video consultation. You may still choose to go ahead with HLC, but it would be unwise to not at least get a few consultations & opinions in the bank before committing to booking flights to Turkey!

10 hours ago, ghostdog said:

I will go dig up some 1990s photos and some recent to show how it’s held up.

the work was ok for that era … but needs a lot more density now.

 

to Melvin… the number of USA based doctors recommended here is limited that’s why the post.

i have met with a few but some are so crazy expensive it’s not realistic.

i have a budget of up to 20k and that’s a stretch.

thanks again ill try to post the roaring 1990s photos tomorrow 

It would be great to see some photos!

Can I ask why you're limited to staying in the US for surgery?