Al - Moderator

Hmm... somewhat disappointing as I was hoping to use my back hair for fill in since I'd like to get rid of my back hair anyway, but this video says that the survival rate is worse than bard and chest hair. It might not be worth trying that then.

Don't believe the myth that it won't thin until you're 80. I'm 45 and my so-called safe area has been thinning for years. My transplanted area keeps thinning as the years go by and the donor area is so thin that I can't cover the scars. You can see my pictures in my profile if you don't believe me. The HT was supposed to give me more hair, not leave me with less.

My hair loss on the sides of my head has extended past the point of the scar in the Hasson and Wong picture posted. You can see what I mean if you look at my profile picts.

I think underarm hair is better. Seriously. It grows longer and straighter... at least on me.

Ok, so the front looks better, but he's still a bald man. I would in no way be interested in that look. And I bet all of the people thinking it's a great transformation wouldn't want to have that look either. Most of them have HTs long before they get that bald.

This is exactly what I need. Thanks for posting. At least there seems to be some hope for me. Now all I have to do is come up with $30000.

I disagree with the diet theory. First of all men were going bald long before the 1900's began when there was no processed foods. Secondly, when I was a kid my mother made my whole family breakfast, packed our lunches, and cooked dinner every night, so I ate the same things the entire rest of my family ate. I started losing my hair at 15, yet my dad had a full head of hair well into his 60's. Third, my cholesterol is 170, blood pressure is normal, glucose is good, etc. and they have always been good, so what I'm eating isn't affecting how my body is functioning in a bad way.

I hope something becomes available soon, but before you get too sure of it, let me give you some parts of an article I have. This is from July 11, 1995. That's 1995, not 2005. 17 years ago and it still hasn't become available. I can tell you that articles similar to this were around from at least 1989 because I read them when researching my own HT. I just don't have them saved. ----- In a promising step in studies of hair growth, researchers at a biotechnology company in California have found a way to fire "bullets" at hair follicles... "We think this delivery system opens the whole hair-loss field to the possibility of gene therapy". … "we found that the skin growing in culture produced hair. This was a big breakthrough". The ability to produce hair bearing skin in the lab provided the researchers with a means for screening "molecules that could modify hair growth." … the next step was to test whether the liposome delivery system could be used for gene therapy. ...the so-called lacZ gene deposited the gene in the hair follicles near the base of the hair shaft. ...a dermatologist at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center in Salt Lake City, said his research team has performed similar experiments "and we've been pleasantly surprised at what can be done with liposomes via the hair follicle. -----

A hair grows, stops growing, falls out, and a few months later a new hair starts growing in its place. This is normal and happens to everyone. So some individual hairs will be just beginning to grow and others will be long and need to be cut and others will be somewhere in between. Also not all hairs will be exactly the same thickness either. This is all normal and none of it means you are losing your hair. Miniaturization is when a large percentage of hair in one area is much thinner than hair in another area. This is usually an indicator of where hair loss will be occurring soon because hair will generally grow thinner, wispier first before no longer growing at all. Your hair appears to be looking very good in pictures, so I don't think you should be too concerned with hair loss.

Am I a client of yours? LOL I deal with the public in my job and from personal experience I can tell you that people who are drunk and/or people who are mad at me for some reason will make comments and it is usually a lot worse than simply saying what's up with your hair. It happens on a semi regular basis.

I would want to know more details of why they are doing more than 1 surgery that day. If yours is planned to be less than 2500 and the other surgery scheduled is just a touchup session of a few hundred grafts that may only take maybe 2 hours then I can see them wanting to schedule another small to mid size session the same day. The fact that he is giving you a discount only if you take a certain day may mean that they don't normally schedule more than 1 per day... unless it's just a sales technique to get you to go for the HT. There's nothing wrong with getting a discount if the situation is OK. Of course it depends on who the Dr. is too, but you haven't said, so I can only comment based on the multiple surgeries in a single day.

As bad as my hair looks I will not wear a hair system (or whatever you want to call it) again. I tried that years ago and felt even worse knowing I had fake hair.

When you place grafts in an area that already has hair you will most likely experience some shock loss of the previous hair. It sounds like that's what happened. It should all grow back in a few months.

I always thought 7 to 10 days was the normal range of time for suture removal.

I had a bigger bald spot than that when I was 15. Most people who have megasession hair transplants don't even get back to the stage you are at. Stop ruining your life over something that isn't there.

I would love to be able to do a BHT transplant to fix my mess, but 6500 grafts at $8 per graft is $52000. I doubt I'll be doing it any time soon, unfortunately.

I keep saying the donor area is not permanent hair like the Drs want you to believe. This area does thin out in some people and it happens long before they reach "old" age. I posted some new pictures on my profile to show what I mean.

Mine is a very old case. I started in 1989. HT surgeries in those days consisted of only a few grafts. Most of mine were in the 50 to maybe 75 range, mostly in size from 2.5mm to 3.75mm. I think the most I ever had in one session was 122 grafts. One thing I now find really disgusting is that they did scalp reductions during the same session that they were doing a strip of 50 or 60 grafts. They had to know the strip scar would be competing for tension along with the scalp reduction. I went through the whole lawsuit thing years ago, but you can't get anywhere with a malpractice suit for elective surgery.... even if they tell you it's necessary! On top of that, in NJ it's not malpractice for someone to perform surgery without a license because malpractice can only be used against an actual Dr., so I'm not sure why anyone would ever bother to go to medical school if they want to practice in NJ. The whole thing makes no sense. I finally posted a couple of pictures on my profile. I may post more in the future. Bill, sorry for taking over your thread.

There's no way to really know how many available grafts you have because what you have now may not be the same as what you have in 15 or 20 years. Let's say you have 9000 grafts available today and you have a session of 2500 to strengthen your front a bit. Maybe 5 or 10 years later you need another 3000 to fill in additional loss behind the hairline and a bit in the crown. You're thinking you have 3500 grafts left, but in another 5 or 10 years when you need more work, the donor may be starting to thin a little and you may only have another 2500 grafts instead of 3500 like you thought. Right now your donor may look great, but that can change over time, so anyone who gives you a number of how many grafts is just taking a guess. Don't rely too much on it.

LETSC, I hope it works out for you. I've had some horrible hair transplants from 20-25 years ago as well, so I know what you mean about not having the confidence to try to make it right. There's always that fear of making it even worse. Good luck to you.

I'm going to disagree. Working out has always caused my hair to fall out faster. I've never taken any kind of steroids, protein shakes, muscle building pills, etc. and I'm not on any medication. From back when I was 15 or 16 and just starting to lift weights in high school (I wanted t be a body builder) my hair fallout has always noticebly increased when I was working out. It would start maybe a week after I begin working out and the speeded up fallout rate would continue for a few months until I got so depressed that I'd stop working out. Then the fallout would slow down. This went on for years. I even stopped working out for several years and that was the slowest rate of fallout I ever had. Over the last few years I've been trying to lift weights again and of course the fallout increased again and slowed again when I stopped. At this point, I'm now 45 and don't have much hair left, so I'm more concerned about my body looking good since there was never anything I could do about the hair. I've been working out on a regular basis for about a year, which is the longest non stop time I've ever been doing it, and my hair fallout has increased ever since and has not stopped. I am completely convinced that my hair falls out faster when I lift weights or work out.

You should be rubbing the shampoo on your scalp. It's better to have a clean scalp. Any hair that comes out during shampooing was going to fall out anyway. You're just making them come out all at once rather than slowly falling out one at a time during the rest of the day.

Yes. I'm pretty sure I hold the record by far. This was a long time ago. I had 25 HT sessions which included 5 scalp reductions done between 1989 and 1994. I averaged one HT surgery about every 2.5 months for about 5.5 years. It brought on some major depression. Not from the hairloss, but the constantly having surgery and always being in the shock loss, waiting for hair to grow, doldrums period. I was at the point where I kept getting sick and having anxiety attacks just thinking about the next surgery. I wanted to kill myself, but as I said, not because of the hair loss. Any time I made a suggestion of what I wanted done or how I might want the hairline to look, etc, I was told I was an extreme case and they were the Dr.s and I was in danger of permanently losing all of my hair unless I did exactly what they said. They told me several times that I was crazy for suggesting how a Dr should perform surgery and that if they did what I wanted it would be my fault if it didn't turn out correctly. Prior to the HTs I had been losing hair since mid teens and it was falling out in clumps as I got to around age 19. I had stinging pain all over my head even if I just touched my hair. It was painful just to comb my hair. At that time just running my hands through my hair would give me a handful of hair. The scalp reductions were supposed to cut out the affected area so it couldn't keep spreading. I find it amazing that some people come here in their mid to late 20's with a bit of mild thinning and are panicking about what to do. I wish I had that "problem". I would have never even thought about having a HT if I was slowly thinning and aging normally.

The short version: I was losing my hair by age 15. At first my mother thought I was pulling it out myself. As it progressed, she said I needed to go to a dermatologist because her brother (my uncle) had a skin/scalp disease when he was young that caused all of his hair to fall out. The "Dr." said I had an "excessive hairloss disease" that had already progressed pretty far and if I didn't do something about it as soon as possible, I would lose all of my hair and never have any chance of getting any of it back. I then went through 25 hair transplants in an attempt to cure my condition. The first 23 were done before I knew it was MPB and the person was not a Dr. The last 2 were done by someone else in an attempt to correct the mess and make me look a bit more normal, which didn't work very well.

The numbness on the top of my head has never gone away and it's been approximately 23 years since my first HT and 18 years since the last one.