Al - Moderator

Yes. That's pretty much it. There was a video posted here some time back that showed the donor strip being removed. I think it's on youtube. The good news in the pictures you link to is that Bosley is using a single blade knife. When I had my HT done at L. I. Medical (Dr Hitzig, Dr Maleka, Dr Schwinning (Stay FAR away from any of them!!!!!) used a 3 blade knife for session sizes of 30 to 122 grafts. I'm sure I lost more follicles from disection and scarring in the donor area than were being transplanted.

It's actually time for my 4 month update. I'm trying to make sure I post once a month on the progress. I don't have time to write full detail now, but things are looking good. I'll post more tomorrow.

Well I never smoked and I don't think it's possible to have lost my hair any faster than I did. I was a NW 5 by age 22 when I had my first HT.

You can try telling Dr. Griffin something like this: There are a few other really good doctors farther away that will do 1300 grafts for $6500. I'd rather have it done locally for convenience, but a $2000 difference is a lot. If you can split the difference and do it for $7500 then it's worth it for me to stay near my house. You never know. He may give you a nice discount to get you as a patient rather than lose you to someone else. It all depends on how much business he has. You can also ask if they have a short notice discount. What happens then is if someone cancels at the last minute they call you up and tell you they have an opening available tomorrow because someone cancelled. You get a big discount for coming in on short notice. Otherwise they would have made $0 on that day. Some places do that and some don't. The drawback is don't really know when your appointment is until a day to a week or 2 ahead of time.

HiFi, How long have you been using the amazing laser brush? I have the 6 laser model that I got for $119. I've been using it for about 4 months now and it really seems to be making a difference. My regimen includes proscar, nizoral shampoo, and the laser brush. I can't use minoxidil because of bad reactions. Looks like the link to your pictures was removed, so I wasn't able to view them.

baldeagle's post is a perfect example of what I've been trying to say about laser therapy over the last few months. He says "the laser thing was a waste of money". If someone reads that it surely sounds like it didn't work for him, yet he says "In all honesty, the laser hair therapy (LHT) DID provide mild to moderate improvement in my hair loss". My guess is he may not feel it was a waste of money if he would have gotten those results for $400 or less. So as I've been saying, when you hear people say it doesn't work, not worth the money, waste of time, etc. you have to ask if it was the money factor rather than the actual results factor. I can certainly understand why someone would rather pay $10,000 for a HT and get a lot more hair than they did by paying $10,000 for laser therapy. I have to ask baldeagle that since he knows it did provide some growth and knows it does work on him, would he consider using a laser comb to prevent furher loss after the HT. It sounds like a reasonable plan to me.

My guess is it's the rogaine/minoxidil that stopped working more than the propecia and you're losing the extra growth you were getting from that. That's known to only work for a few years in many people. Propecia has a longer time frame of effectiveness. I've been taking it for 10 years and it's still working for me. I'll also add that I think there can be a few years when you would naturally be going through very fast, agressive hairloss that the meds have a harder time fighting it. Once you get past those years to when your hairloss will have slowed on it's own, the meds start having a better effect again. If you can keep as much hair as possible until then you'll be better off at that time. At least that's what seemed to happen to me over the years.

OK. Let me see if I can help clear this up between everyone. I think there are 2 main points of yours that if you toned down some the entire thing would have been taken more seriously. I think the first problem was calling it repair work. I think that was a bit extreme. I would call it more of unsatisfactory work. I think if you called it something more along the lines of that then the other thread wouldn't have been so hostile. The next problem was the scar. You made it sound much worse than it is. Maybe partly because Dr Feller said he couldn't do anything to fix it because it wasn't in the area that he felt it was better to take donor hair from. I wouldn't like it either if I went to try to get scar reduction and the Dr said he can't do it at this time, but I don't think that makes it a bad scar I don't view it as a bad scar. It's a bit wide at some spots, but this does happen. Not everyone has a scar that can hardly be seen. I don't see yours as overly wide from what I can see of it. I also don't agree with the way you say it was done incorrectly. I think that's more of a philosophy thing. Most doctors make the smiley face scar, but I can tell you from experience that it can sometimes be better to have a low scar. It's easier to cover a lower scar if your balding area increases in size. That could make a higher scar unable to be hidden well if the bald area widens to near the scar line on the sides. I don't know what you looked like 3 years ago when you had the first HT done, but I can imagine the doctor would have taken young age and extent of hairloss in consideration and placed the donor scar in that spot in case you ended up at a NW 7. Now on to the parts I agree with from what I can see. It does look like you got less than satisfactory growth, although I don't know if wearing a hair system for 3 years may have made it worse than it would have been. It looks like you got an inch or so of grafts placed around the front hairline (looks like a reddish area along your hairline). Is that the grafts? Or is that because of the hair system? I'm not sure on that. I don't know what kind of expectations you had, but I'll assume you had reasonable expectations for 2000 grafts that you say were agreed upon. I think if anyone went in expecting to end up with growth that 2000 grafts would reasonably achieve then they should definitely be unsatisfied if the results don't show that. You expect to get growth of 2000 grafts. The Dr only does 1500. That fact alone I know would be unacceptable to many people on here including myself. Add that to not even getting (from what I can see at this point in time) decent growth for 1500 and I can certainly agree that the results are unsatisfactory and below what it should have been So my conclusion is: Yes I can see why you would be unhappy with the results. From what I see it looks like you had poor growth and not enough grafts even if there was good growth. I don't think anyone would be happy with what I see. However I don't think the scar was bad as far as HT scars go. PS. I see you're looking much better now. At least now you can get rid of the hair system and be happy with hair!!

For FUE you have to buzz the entire area for the procedure to be done, but afterwards you can grow your hair as long as you want to. With strip some doctors require shaving the recipient area if you still have some of your own hair growing there, but afterwards you can grow your hair to any length, although you may have a donor scar visible at very short lengths. The donor area will be buzz cut, but most of that area is what is being removed to be placed where you need it and that will be sutured or stapled closed.

If you're going to try this I suggest you buy a laser comb and use it at home rather than going to a clinic and spending thousands.

Are you taking any medication for the stress disorder? If you are then perhaps that's what is causing the hair loss.

Read the label for the active ingredient. The active ingredient in Nizoral is Ketoconazole 1% (or 2% by prescription). If the active ingredient in Fungoral is the same then you should be OK.

A few well know people saying it doesn't work, but who have never actually tried it or done any study is not what I consider evidence that it doesn't work. If you read posts on various forums and such I think you'll find that most people who say it doesn't work are those who never used it and most people who have used one say it does work. Don't compare a home use comb or device with laser hoods used a few times a week at a doctors office. You can have 1000 people use rogaine 2 or 3 times a week and they won't get anywhere near the same growth results as a group of people using it twice a day as suggested.

When i started using the laser comb, I decided to try it for 6 months before I made a final determination of whether I thought it worked or was total crap. However I also said I would keep everyone updated on the progress (or lack of) during those 6 months. This is what I have done. If my hair all falls out I will tell you. If it grows in like Elvis I'll tell you. If after 6 months I feel my hair is till the same as it was before I'll say that. I have no agenda other than trying to get more hair growing on my head. I post about it to let others know how my trial is going since there doesn't seem to be any other real ongoing results anywhere. I really wish the other 2 or 3 people who said they startd using it around the same time I did would post their results so we can see what's going on. What happened to Petesman?

Somewhat true I agree, but 1. I'm not here to be a guinea pig and stop taking everything else that helps just so I can prove to you or anyone whether or not the laser comb works. I'm here to grow hair. If what works for me is a combination of things then that's what I'll use. 2. I've been on proscar for 10 years since it came out. It stopped my hair from falling out and has very slowly over the years thickened my hair, but that was a VERY slow process over many years. Some of the hair that grew has never grown past being short thin hairs. Even the ones that did grow long still were very thin, fine, wispy hairs. 3 I said several times I thought I was a good candidate to try the laser comb because the proscar did grow a lot of very fine hairs on my head, so the laser comb had something to work with since the biggest thing about the laser comb is it's supposed to help existing hairs grow better, longer, and thicker. 4. Once I started using the laser comb some of the fine hairs that can hardly ever be seen started growing longer. Some of them have now grown to an inch or more where the most they ever grew before was just barely breaking the surface. The ones that were growing longer before seem to be thickening in the shaft. This was not happening (or happening VERY slowly over a period of years with proscar). 5. I was able to reduce the proscar dosage because I no longer get a sebum buildup on my scalp. After more than 25 years of oily, greasy, sebum filled scalp unless I took enough proscar, it suddenly stopped just a few days after starting to use the laser comb. With that, my 3 month of use feelings is that the laser comb is working.

I personally feel it's closer to around 20%. I have nothing to back that up. i just seem to see a lot more than a small percentage saying they had at least some mild side effects. maybe I'm wrong.It's just my personal feelings. Count me as one who has some minor libido side effects. Taking lower dose than recommended stops the side effects in me without reducing the good effects much.

It says they are regenerating follicles. If that's the case then it shouldn't matter if a HT damages old follicles or leaves a scar in the donor area. In addition it's also possible to get new growth from follicles that still exist in between the transplanted ones. This already happens to some extent with using rogaine and propecia after having a HT.

I promised to keep updating you on my laser comb progress. Up until now I've posted only positive things, but I promised to be honest, so now I'll post some sort of bad news. Over the last week or 2 I've noticed some shedding of the new hair that had been growing in during the first 3 months of use. I kind of expected it since I didn't think all of the new hair would continue to grow into thick, long hairs as a lot of them started out as very fine hairs. I'm hoping they will start growing again on the next cycle and will grow in longer and thicker the next growth cycle. Until then though it's a little depressing, but I'm still ahead of the game overall and I'll continue using the laser comb at least a few more months to see if a next growth cycle comes along. I also think I may have contributed to at least some of the fall out by backing off of the proscar too much. I'll start using that a little more, but still going for a lower dose than I had been at before the laser comb. I'll update you again in another month or so.

Sometimes when you go to one of the chains you don't really know the doctors name until later because they'd rather push the chain name or one of the more well known doctors associated with the chain even if he isn't the one who will perform the surgery on you, so it gets extremely hard to find any information on doctors working at well known chains.

and TheEmperor relied I just want to point out that my donor closure was not done by a doctor either. The techs did that.

Guys, my hair is growing in from the laser comb. Seriously! I'm at the 3 month mark now and even I am surprised by the results so far. Now I really wish I took better pictures at the beginning, but I didn't expect to get this much hair growing all over where it would be noticeable in pictures. I had some thin hair all over my head to begin with, so I figured a little thickening wouldn't really be able to be shown in pictures. You would just be able to say it's the lighting or whatever. But I have to tell you it's definitely noticeable now. I have some pictures of me at an outside wedding last month and some of those show my head very well (very bad! LOL) in natural light, so I might be able to use those for before pics. I'm on vacation the first week of November, so I'll try to take some outside pics to compare. Also, I hate to even say this because I know you'll think I'm crazy or making this up, but my scars from old transplants are actually filling in! I didn't think that was possible. This one I can prove because I do have pictures of my scars from years ago. I'll get some pics up here soon.

You do have a very large area to cover, so I can see why someone would suggest looking at body hair if you are trying to get coverage everywhere. If you're willing to leave the crown alone, then 3000 in the frontal 1/2 is a good idea. If BHT ever improves, you might then be able to go for another session with 1000 or so strip from your donor area on your head mixed with a lot of body hair.

At $299 the X5 is still rather pricey. Do you really need a digital timer? I just look at my watch when I start and spend 8 to 10 minutes. How hard is that? If you do get a laser comb/brush/gadget make sure you use it every day on a clean scalp. Most instructions for laser combs say to use it 3 times a week, but I personally think daily use will produce better results. I use mine after I shower and my hair has just dried. A clean scalp allows the laser light to penetrate into the follicle better because there's no oil and sebum buildup to block it.

I also use it everyday.

It's normal for transplanted hair to grow in somewhat frizzy. I don't know if that happens to everyone though. As it grows out and you get a few hair cuts it will slowly soften up. I'd say in the 12 to 18 month range is where I used to see the frizzyness go away.