Al - Moderator

Be glad it wasn't the other way around. I think some people who have a good experience with one cosmetic surgery suddenly think they can simply have other surgeries and look like whatever they want to. It doesn't always work out that way. At some point you have to realize you're going to continue to age.

The hair pull test is a complete waste of time. It doesn't tell you anything. As you already said you still don't know if it's just MPB or something else. Worse than that it doesn't even tell you if your hair is falling out or not. Here's an example: 1. Do a hair pull test before you take a shower. You'll probably pull a few hairs. 2. Now take a shower and shampoo your hair really good. Then dry your hair with a towel and try a hair pull test again. You probably won't get any hairs because all the loose ones came out while shampooing and drying your hair. So if you see a dermatologist just after you shower and go there he'll tell you that you're not losing hair. If you go at the end of the day, he'll probably tug a few hairs out and give you a different answer. The only time it "works" is if you're losing so much hair so rapidly that it's obviously falling out because of something other than MPB, but then you didn't need a hair pull test to tell you that either.

I personally think weight lifting is good for your hair because it releases HGH which more than offsets the increase in testosterone. Since I've been lifting weights the last year and a half my hair has been growing in areas where there hasn't been any in years in the temples. Not a lot. Just a few hairs, but that's more than I've had. It's not the lifting weights that's bad it's the supplements and steroids and stuff that people take. Stay way from all of that. I just lift weights and don't take any of the crap that's supposed to build muscles. those are the things that make your hair fall out.

A lot of people have a naturally occurring thin area just above the ears. It's usually not noticed because the hair above the ears covers it easily and also you probably never spent much time checking the hair just above and behind your ears to ever notice it. Now that you have a HT scar the area is more noticeable because there's not as much hair just above the ear to cover the section. Instead you have thick hair above the scar line and thin below the scar line rather than a gradual thicknes to thinness you probably had naturally. The good news is once the hair around the scar grows back in you'll be back to at least near normalcy in that area. It may take a few months for the hair to grow back in around the scar.

Petesman, Please do post updates every few months. We need some believable reviews, good or bad, from people on this forum rather than the useless one time posters/advertisers who say it works great. Go buy it. Take some before pics first, so we can later compare with newer pics and view any (hopefully for you) growth progress.

It's normal for numbness to stay for several months or more. Normal feeling will usually gradually come back over time. In some extreme cases the numbness may never go away.

Part of the problem is a lot of times the surgery looks fine at first. With a 2 year statute of limitations, the 1st year is lost in the normal "waiting for the hair to grow in" period. Even then there's usually some improvement. It's usually not until some years later when you continue to lose hair that it becomes a big mess. That's why some places will densly transplant young guys hairlines and not worry about what will happen. By the time the kid gets to be 35 and looks like a freak with a thick hairline and nothing behind it, there's nothing the guy can do to the doctor hat did it. To some "doctors" it's better to take the money that others won't without having to worry about any lawsuits. Umm.... You're a bit late. A lot of doctors already did this. It's called scalp reduction. It was supposed to eliminate 80% of my bald area and leave me with just a small strip of bald skin in the top middle and the front harline that needed to be transplanted with a few hundred grafts. I had 5 scalp reductions. Didn't work.

There is generally a 2 year statute of limitations for lawsuits on this, but I don't know where he had it done. I said earlier it looks like it was done some years ago because you can see he lost more hair past the scar in the back and lost hair in the hairline which would have been on the side originally before the hair flap was flipped to the front. Even if you could sue it's a major uphill battle because it's elective surgery and you sign off on it accepting any risks involved. I've been down that road. The state attorney general wouldn't help because once I sign that it's OK for them to perform surgery the doctor is pretty much free to do whatever he wants. This goes back to a post I made some time ago about accepting the risks. Several people said they accepted the risks involved and if it hadn't turned out the way they hoped then they would just move on and not worry about it. I responded that it's easy to say that AFTER you had the surgery and know the result. But how do you really know you will accept what happens. Think about whether you would be OK with this if it happened to you. This guy did not have surgery thinking this would happen. As far as helping... I have to wonder how much he can be helped. Sure he can have some hair transplanted from the back and sides to the frontal 3rd and that might look OK from the front, but he has a large total area to cover. I think he'll still end up with a large bald area on top/back which will still leave him with some scars in those areas. If he still ends up with a lot of bald area, he may prefer to keep shaving his head, but then he'll have a long scar along the back and sides from the new strip scar that was needed to put some grafts in the front. It's up to him what he feels will be better. I get people telling me all the time that my hair is so thin that I should just shave it all off, but I have so many scars that they don't see that it would just look a lot worse if I did shave it.

I don't think it's right to require anyone to post here, but I do think they should be required to update us on their current work. There's a section of this site that lists all of the coalition doctors and you can view before and after pictures from each doctor. Some of those pics are several years old. If the docs would just update those once a year or so with bigger and better pictures that would be all we need from them to keep us updated on their latest work.

It was a long time ago. I had tried minoxidil at the time, but it made me dizzy and a rapid heart beat with some chest pain. I had to stop taking it. I've been on proscar for 10 years now.

Read the literature for normal dosage. Some of the side effects are chest pains, blood pressure increases or decreases, heart palpitations, pulse rate increases or decreases, etc. One of the side effects of absorbing too much minoxidil is an increased frequency of angina or new onset of angina. It doesn't take a genious to realize that the higher dosage you continuously take, the more likely and the more severe the negative effects are going to be. At some level you are eventually going to kill yourself.

I know exactly what you mean. My dad had full thick hair well into his 50s and my mom felt if I wanted to have hair I should stop making mine fall out. She thought I was purposely pulling my hair out of my head. I think to this day she still feels it was my fault that my hair fell out. I took my mom with me to the HT consultation just so I could have someone else there to make sure I'm not just hearing what I wanted to hear. A few years later when I had a lawsuit going on she refused to help or be a witness because she insisted that if the doctor said I would have a full head of hair and could have the hairline where I wanted it then it was my fault if that didn't happen.

This looks like it was done some years ago. You can tell by the scars. There's a scar along his hairline in the front picture with no hair behind it. When you look at the side picture, you can see the hair was flipped to cover the front, but as he lost more hair (bald area getting wider and longer) the hairline was lost because that was hair that was originally along the fringe area. This guy might actually look worse than I do and that would be a first. He has less scars, but I at least have some sort of hair pattern. If I shaved my head the way he did though, I would probably look worse just because of the scarring I have. I feel bad for him, but it's strange that it makes me feel just a slight bit better knowing I'm not the only one in really bad shape.

Too much minoxidil will cause a heart attack.

Unfortunately I had sort of the opposite. A girl I was dating a while before I had my HT knew I was looking into having it done. We broke up and I had several HT sessions starting about 6 months after we broke up. About 3 years later we met again and she asked me why I never had the transplant that I said I was going to do. My hair had been falling out so fast that the HT did not even bring me to where I had been 6 months prior to starting. The "After" pictures of my top and back look worse than the "before" pictures.

I think that statement is misunderstood. They are not saying that they won't care what they look like later in life. What they are saying is some hair loss is more acceptable later in life. I don't know anyone who does not agree with that. Put it this way, if you HAD to be bald for 20 years, would you rather be bald from age 20 to 40 or would you rather be bald from age 40 to 60? Thinning and balding after age 40 is more acceptable both to men and women. You can be bald over 40 and get dates, but try being bald and dating at age 20. Unless you can pull off the shaved head and goatee look (which I don't like on myself) you're stuck with dating women 10 years older than you who think you are 10 years older than you are... and once they find out your real age they run away screaming because they are dating a kid. Their thinking is if you are going to wait until you are 40 to just get the front 1/3 or 1/2 filled in, then why not just do that at 20? Why be bald for 20 years to do it? I'm attaching an old picture of myself at age 22. Sorry about the low quality. What would be the problem of filling in the front portion at that age rather than waiting 15 or 20 years to fill in the same area?

I don't think the link to the picture in this thread is what Blondie is talking about. I would not just get a line of hair along the hairline. What I think Blondie is saying is why not get the entire front half filled in with transplants and then just have the remaining circle of crown covered with a hair system. This way you get a full look without the front looking fake. When I went for my HT years ago this was exactly my thinking. I was wearing a hair system for 7 months before going in for the HT. I was early 20s and already a NW 5-6. I thought even if I can't get full coverage maybe I can at least get the front half done and continue to wear the system to cover the back while I'm young. Later as I get older I could remove the hair system and still look age appropriate as I would have hair in the front half and just a bald spot in the back. If I'm lucky then maybe I could get a small amount of hair transplanted to the bald area at that time to get thin coverage there too. It sounded a lot better than "You're too young for a hair transplant. Stay bald for 15 or 20 years and then get just the front portion covered." Heck, if I was only going to get the front covered at age 40 why not get the front covered at 20!? So... yes I do think the half and half approach is a good idea for certain people. For me, unfortunately, the mother-@#$%^& bastard "doctor" told me I was crazy and convinced me that I had some disease and HAD to have a transplant for my entire head because all of my hair would fall out if I didn't. To prove to me they could give me the same thick coverage over my entire head that the hair system gave me, he started the transplant on the top/back of my head first. They didn't do the hairline until several sessions later. Looking back later i realized he did that just to be sure I'd keep going back there and they'd maximize their profit potential from me because if he did the hairline first I would have stopped going for more transplants. I ended up not having enough donor for the front and had to have some of the grafts in the back taken out and then re-transplanted to the front.

You guys missed what he said in an earlier post. His HT was NOT for MPB. He said the HT was to cover a scar above his ear that he got in a car accident. Whether 70 is enough all depends on how big the scar was.

I personally preferred October or November for a HT. The cold weather was just starting to come, so I could wear hats all winter whenever I went out without anyone thinking anything or seeing my work in progress. Then by the time April and May came around my hair would start growing in so I'd be ready for the Summer. Well that was always my plan anyway. Never really worked out like that though.

If you have health insurance,depending on what insurance you have, they should cover it as it's reconstructive surgery to correct the result of an injury. Did he have stitches along the eyebrow? What caused the scar? If it's from a cut that needed stitches, a few hairs along the edges of the scar may grow back. You may want to wait another few months to see what happens.

I've heard this before. I'm not sure I agree with it. Is there any actual data on this? I say this because I had a strip procedure done years ago to remove an area of larger punch grafts that were then cut and redistributed to fill in other areas. Then on a later session I had the strip scar filled in with some mini grafts to blend it in with the rest of my hair. They grew just fine.

Mein Hair, I'm in pretty much the same situation as you. The pluggy-ness of mine isn't so bad, but it's very thin. I'd be happy just to get the donor area thickened up a bit and maybe a little around the edges of the balding area so the area doesn't look so large. Obviously I can't do it with donor hair because I don't have any, so I've been thinking about using body hair to fill in a few spots. I certainly have enough hair on my body, but after 25 surgeries years ago, I'm afraid to try anything for fear of making it worse.

OK. The title of the post is Bosley Boston. You say you went to a doctor in Florida. Now you're asking about former Bosley patients. Question: Are you a former Bosley patient who then tried to have some fix up work done in Florida? That might explain a little bit about the session size. Were you just trying to put grafts in to cover a few scars? Were you just trying to fill in a small area where maybe a few grafts didn't grow?

Why are you so concerned about how much a discount was? They told you your final cost would be $680. You paid $680 and had the procedure done. They sent you a receipt saying you paid $680 and owe $0. They can't send you a bill later simply because they decide to bill you more. If that were possible I'd start charging everyone who ever bought anything from me an extra $500 after they paid for it. From what you say, it sounds like they have a standard $4000 per session charge and whatever amount of grafts they do that's the price. This way you know how much it's going to cost you upfront. Since in your case they determined that for whatever reason you only needed a very small session, they gave you a "discount" on the standard $4000 session fee and made it $680. This $680 would cover however many grafts they ultimately did, but they estimated around 70. The idea of doing that sounds ok to me, but you have to be careful that you don't get a lot less work done than they estimated because really you are pretty much getting charged for the estimated work, so if they do a lot less then that then you are paying more per graft then they led you to believe and you end up being overcharged compared to other places you could have gone. In any case, what concerns me is if they really only did so few grafts. I did have a session of just 12 grafts many years ago with a strip scar (can you guys believe that!), but I didn't really think anyone was still as horrible as the place I went to. I'd like to know why you would only need 70 (or less as you say you got) grafts.

I always combed my hair to the side because my hair naturally grows that way, so it wasn't too hard to cover the thinning on top at first. The problem was I was only in my mid teens. My mom used to yell at me to stop pulling my hair out. It wasn't easy being called the kid with the bald spot at 16 years old. By the time I was 18 I couldn't cover it anymore and people were even asking me what disease I had or what was wrong with me, so I did start doing more of a comb over to try to hide it more. I didn't really realize I was doing a combover until one day my mom said "You comb your hair like a 40 year old bald man." and I just said back to her "Well I AM bald. That's why I look 40." My mom was still blaming it on me thinking I was pulling my hair out because I loved to run my fingers though my hair all day and twirl the ends of it since I was a little kid. I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror after that... and I think I started combing it over even more. The really bad part was after I had a hair transplant. Since then, I can't even cover the sides and back. I wish I could go back to just worrying about the top and maybe just shave it or cut it very short. Instead I have no options at all.