Al - Moderator

I would do the HT at the beginning of the 3rd week, giving you 2 weeks enjoyable vacation, 1 week for the HT to heal, and back to work wearing a hat with no problems. Remember that you'll have forehead swelling sometime during days 2 through 5 after the HT and even with a hat this can sometimes be noticeable depending on how bad your swelling is, so allow some time for that just to be safe if you don't want anyone to know you did anything.

You're missing the point. Had he gone on this show just to talk about his results and hts in general is one thing. But he took his doctor on the show which essentially turns it into an infomercial. He is now marketing a specific practice's results. What would you say if all ht clinics had results on their web sites with guys with concealer and did not say they had it in their hair?

For someone in the public eye, at some point he has to show the world his new look and he may have felt it was easier to do an interview and say here it is and this is what I did. Maybe he felt this was better than getting a bunch of questions and rumors if he had just shown himself one day with hair.

As for taking the Dr with him, I don't really see what the difference is between him and people on this forum. They have a HT, post here about their results, and tell you how great the Dr is (i.e. taking the Dr with them). Nothing wrong with that. If he's happy with his results why wouldn't he want everyone to know who he went to?

I do somewhat agree with the concealor if he was wearing it, but then again, I know there are people here who have a HT and yet still don't want to be seen in public without concealer on, so again, why should he be different?

If you ask someone who is satisfied with their hair transplant they will tell you the better choice was going with the hair.

If you ask someone who had a failed hair transplant they will tell you they should have gone with the car instead.

You have to decide if you can part with $20000 even if you don't get the results you desire. Even if it's nor a failed HT, it's very likely that you won't have the density you hope for. Most people end up going for a 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th HT to get the desired result. Don't make your decision on either a car or HT because you may find yourself needing to make that decision again soon after the first HT.

You have to decide whether the ATTEMPT to get your hair back is worth not having the car.

*** I'm writing this from experience as I went through the lawsuit. I signed a short 1 page waiver that did not mention scars. I also paid $150 extra per session for a guarantee. ***

The difference between a hair transplant and dental surgery is that hair transplants are considered cosmetic surgery and therefore not needed, so it's up to you to decide if you want to try it or not. If it doesn't work out, it was your decision to try it. You won't get far suing for something you chose to do that wasn't necessary.

This is true even if the Dr lied about expected results, told you the surgery was required, didn't have certain things in the waiver (in fact they don't even need to have you sign a waiver. They do so to give them even more protection), didn't have any of the training they said they did (because elective surgery does not legally require any specific training), etc, etc.

Believe it or not It does not even matter if the so called Dr turns out to not be a licensed Dr. In fact that even has advantages to the so called Dr. because you can't sue for medical malpractice for elective surgery if the person performing the surgery is not a Dr.

You can sue for consumer fraud, but then you have to prove that the Dr lied to you or isn't able to offer something similar to what was promised. This is where the waiver really protects them. Even if you didn't sign a waiver the Dr wilt simply show photos of previous patients or actual patients in person (that work for him of course) showing that he does do quality of work. The Dr will then say that he can fix, correct, modify, etc any areas that you are not happy with. It will then be up to you to prove that he can't do that. But how can you prove something by refusing to allow the Dr to do it? You almost can't unless you have other Drs willing to say that you can't be helped, which is very unlikely.

Bottom line is it's EXTREMELY hard to successfully sue for a hair transplant in the USA.

It's not that some people have an agenda against Dr. Feller. The problem is they think the Dr. should be a little more understanding of patients who have questions or concerns. After JAG posted that he's been unable to speak to the Dr after several attempts, Dr Feller came on and basically said he does not talk to patients after their procedure. It was very unprofessional and made JAGs post even more believable since there is Dr Feller agreeing that he will not have a phone conversation with a patient who spent thousands of dollars on a procedure. I think Dr. Feller should have said something like the following:

----

JAG,

I apologize for the run around you've been getting. I normally don't do phone consultations because I can't give much relevant information without actually seeing and examining you in person and that is why the receptionist did not set one up. However, since you do live far and it would be an inconvenience for you to get here just to voice some concerns, I told my receptionist to go ahead and set up a phone appointment with you. Just call the office and she will set it up and we will get this done and hopefully get you some answers.

----

Now if Dr. Feller would have posted something like that, then the entire rest of the postings here would have been about how great Dr. Feller is and that he really takes care of his patients. Instead it went the opposite way.

You can look at all of my old posts that deal with him and I have always said that I think he does great hair transplants, so I don't have any "agenda". However while he does great HTs, he can use some help in his response and reaction to patients who aren't totally thrilled with the HT or who still have some concerns.

I wore a hair system for 7 months and could not stand it. I felt better being bald than I did constantly wondering if someone could tell I had a hair system. At work I kept going to the men's room to check if I could tell or not. It was horrible.

please do not say that Feller will sue online posters just because they accuse him of bad results or poor communication. Their accuses were far worse than what he is being accused of here.

Just wanted to note that I was also threatened with a lawsuit by Dr. Feller, so that makes at least 3.

Why bother? What can you possibly learn? If you are losing your hair then you already know the answer. You're losing your hair. If you're not losing any hair, then again, what can the test tell you? Maybe you will lose your hair in the future? That doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. On top of that it's only 70% accurate, so you still don't know if they are right anyway. Complete waste of money.

Simple solution. If you're losing some hair then start on the meds. If you're not losing any then enjoy your life and don't worry about it until you are losing some hair. Then start on the meds. Don't need a test to tell you that.

You should try using a laser comb daily for several months. Seriously. A lot of people here may tell you it's a waste of money, but your type of hairloss is what I think a lasercomb works best on. I used one for a while a few years ago and it grew hair back in shock loss areas from old transplants done 20 years ago. I hadn't grown hair in those areas in all those years, but I got a bit of new growth from the lasercomb.

I have seen people on this site that have just given up and shaved their heads. Not sure why they would do that though?

Let's say you spend about $20000 for a 3500 graft session. A year or 2 later you realize you didn't get as much growth as you thought you would (maybe your hair characteristics aren't as good as some of the pictures you see here) and your continued hair loss has put you basically at the same amount of hair you had before you started. Do you pay an additional $20000 for another 3500 session that you now know won't get you to where you want to be? What about if your hair loss continues? You could end up still looking the same a year or 2 later and now you're out $40000 plus all the time in the ugly stage twice waiting for it to grow. Some people in that situation feel they are wasting their good years even more by being in the post HT ugly stage over and over rather than being in the thinning/balding like a normal guy ugly stage. Besides, where do you get the $20000 for the 2nd session when you still have several years to pay for the first $20000?

Reason enough yet to see why some people stop?

I had a hair system prior to having a HT. As bad as my hair looks now I will still not go back to wearing a hair system.

LT,

Before going with tattooing in the scars, maybe you should try a small BHT session to fill in the scars and see if that grows. If it does then you can consider more BHT for other areas. If it doesn't grow well then you can always go to the tattooing.

Even if had exhausted my scalp donor hair, I'm not sure that I would risk BHT. It might not grow and if it does the quality of the hair is not very good. Plus it's EXPENSIVE. And if it doesn't take, your scalp has to absorb that dead graft and it could cause some irritation.

Easy to say when you're not faced with it. So my question to you is what would you do? Your choices are

1. Do nothing and keep losing more hair exposing the scars and leaving gaps between the transplanted hair and the native hair.

2. Buzz your hair down exposing the scars even more.

3. Try some BHT into the scars so you can buzz cut and possibly some BHT into other areas to lessen the gaps.

The weird part of my hairline is it is receding, which is odd at age 16. It started at 15

I started losing my hair at 15. My mom noticed it first because she used to cut my hair when I was a kid. At age 16 I had a lot of thinning in the crown. By 17 I had to start doing a combover as I then had a lot of thinning over the entire top of my head from front to back. By 18 I couldn't cover the bald area in back no matter how I combed it. By 19 I could no longer cover the top or front with a combover either.

Now at 43 I still have a lot of tiny hairs in the corners that don't grow.

Another option is to go with a 3000 graft procedure rather than 4500. You can always go back later and have more done when you have more money saved.

Drs are allowed to prescribe things for uses other than they are intended as long as they feel it would be beneficial to the patient. Obviously proscar would be as beneficial as propecia because it's the exact same thing, so I can't understand why a Dr would not prescribe it as long as they don't submit it to the insurance company. What the patient does after he leaves the office (whether the patient submits a claim on their own or not) is up to the patient and the Dr can't be held responsible for any insurance fraud.

If your insurance covers proscar for prostate problems, but not hairloss, then simply don't use your insurance for it. You can pay the entire cost with no need to feel guilty about insurance fraud since you haven't used your insurance.

obsessing over all of these details once you have taken the plunge is just a complete waste of precious time. You will either look good or look like shit -- and if you look good then just move on and forget that you ever even had a hairloss problem.

That's great if it turns out looking good. I would have forgotten about it and moved on too, but what do you do if it looks like shit? That's worse than not ever doing it at all.

When you have the first procedure, your donor area is shaved down and afterwards the little bit of hair that you did have in the recipient area falls out from shock loss. You wait 6 months before you feel like you even get back to where you were before you started. The next few months you get some good growth, but wish it was thicker.

Now you go back for a 2nd procedure. Afterwards you get more stressed than the first time because you know all the progress you just had disappeared because your recipient area was shaved again, some of the new hair will fall out from temporary shock loss again, you have to wait another 6 months to start showing improvement, etc.

You're asking yourself if it is worth all the money and getting a scar across the back of your head if all that's happening is a few years are going by with you having worse hair most of that time than you had if you didn't do anything at all.

Some people breeze right through it, but for others it can get very stressful. If that's what's happening to you, then I do think it's normal for some people. You say it's going away and my guess is if you didn't hate the way the first one turned out (other than not thick enough) you'll feel much better after another few months when you start seeing the results.

Dude, you are thinking way too much about it. You are 32 years old and have some thinning hair. Did you somehow think you would never lose any hair until you were 80? There are a lot of people 10 years younger than you who have less hair than you have. Consider yourself lucky to make it through your twenties without any major hair problems.

One thing that REALLY turns me off about about visiting potential HT surgeons is that many of them have salespeople do the consultation. AND they charge money for that "privilege".

 

The fact that I have to pay money to meet with someone wearing a white coat, who isn't even a doctor, to tell me I should do the surgery is rubbish. Of course they tell me I should do the surgery when they will get $8,000 to $10,000!

 

Even if the doctor is good, if you want to discuss a surgery, you should meet with doctor personally, not their salespeople or assistants with white coats.

This is something that really bothers me too. I don't know how they get away with it. In the USA only a licensed Dr can determine if you are a candidate for surgery. Only a Dr can determine if you have any disease or condition that might make you not a candidate. Only a Dr can recommend that you have surgery.

This happened to me and I'm still living in hell because of it over 20 years later.

Pale_Rider,

Those things are all in testing or experimental phases which is the same stage that hair regeneration or cloning is, which makes sense.

Just curious. I don't hear much about it anywhere, and its a patented technique.

 

Here's its claims

 

 

 

• Guaranteed regrowth in the donor area

• Absolutely no scarring. Not just "no visible scarring," this means no scarring at all!

• Completely natural result

• Because donor area is preserved, follow-up treatments are possible

 

 

I don't know anything about their technique, but just because someone claims something doesn't make it true. I had a HT years ago and was concerned about my sides beginning to thin. I wasn't going to go through with it if all they were going to do is move some hair around from one area to another. So they gave me a guarantee of increasing the amount of hair in the donor area, no scar whatsoever, and unlimited amount of donor hair so that I could never run out. They charged me $150 per HT session for the guarantees.

I now have multiple strip scars, worse than depleted donor area, and very little hair on top to show for it.

Then, in my late 30s I started to realize that even the people (women especially) whom I considered to be "on my level" and not the superficial type still possessed the inclination to stereotype people based upon their hairloss. Most people are completely unaware that MPB has nothing to do with a lack of health; they actually are under the assumption that balding people should be taking better care of themselves, and then they would grow their hair back.

 

Once I realized this it became unequivocally clear that even those people who are not superficial and on my level will unconsciously discriminate against those of us with MPB, without even realizing it! If a woman thinks you must be eating bad and not taking care of your health because of your thinning hair, she will be less attracted to you -- NOT because of the hairloss, but because she thinks you are not health conscious and she wants to be with a man who is

I agree. I lost most of my hair at a very early age (before I was 20) and I was sometimes asked what disease I had. Guys made fun of my hair loss, but it was the women who really thought I was sick and stayed away from me.

It's 16 years since my last HT (21 years since the first one) and my entire recipient area is still mostly numb. It seems to be improving very slowly the past few years. The donor area is a bit better, but still some numbness in spots.

If you go with a scalp reduction to lower your hairline, you will most likely end up with a visible scar along the hairline (just in front of the hairline). You'll then need to have at least a few hundred hair transplant grafts put in front of the hairline along the scar to cover it, so it isn't noticeable. You might be better off just going with the hair transplant to begin with, since you'll probably need it (want it) anyway afterwards. Having a visible scar across your forehead can be worse than having a high hairline, so while the results from a scalp reduction may be instantaneous, it may not be the result you want.

Unless there's another reason why the scalp lowering is being done such as poor donor, large area on top and back that you also want to cover, etc, I'd probably go with the hair transplant.