Al - Moderator

Almost all hair transplant Drs used to offer free consultations, but these days so many people get many multiple consultations which means the Drs are doing a lot more consultations compared to how many patients they are actually getting from it. This makes them have to start charging for all the extra time they are spending on consultations these days. I think this is especially true in the USA and perhaps the UK too where people who live there get consultations from high quality Drs/clinics, but have no intention of ever going there for the actual transplant. They then go to a lower cost country to have the surgery without ever having a consultation there because they just had 3 of them in their own country, just to get a good idea of the number of grafts and what they can expect. So basically what happens is the Drs in the higher priced countries are doing the in-person consultations for the Drs in the lower priced countries. Most places, though, will put the cost of the consultation towards the hair transplant if you go with them, so essentially, if you are serious about getting a hair transplant with the Dr you had a consultation with then it will be a free consulation.

If it's really bothering you then go for it. Just be smart about it. Don't go to a hair mill or anyone who tries to give you a low hairline. Opt for a high hairline and do the front half first. Dr Bicer is fine for this as she is cheap, but very good and also usually plans on the front first and then the crown later in cases like yours.

Looks fine for 3 months.

Yep. Same situation here. My dad had a full head of hair into his 70s and even now in his 90s he still has more hair than I had at 20. I have the same hair loss pattern as my uncle, which is NW 7 before 30.

You can conclude that you have seen proof that men over 40 who still have a lot of hair can end up as NW 6. A lot of people don't seem to believe that.

Some will say nocebo ! The internet and youtube is not helping people sometimes watching too much of Haircafe channel It certainly wasn't that in my case. I didn't even know it was Minoxidil. I only knew it was something the clinic gave me to help my hair grow. This was back in the 80s when Minox just came out. I had to ask them what it was when I started suspecting it was the cause my my aching chest pains.

I tried Minoxidil years ago. I got the heart palpitations within 45 minutes of using it. I used it a few times before I realized it was the Minoxidil doing it. I though I was having a heart attack. Stopping the Minoxidil stopped the problems.

Right. I was thinking the same thing. Just call the clinic. It could be that the person you've been in contact with has been out sick a few days or maybe on vacation. Just call the clinic and ask them if they can give you whatever info you need.

That is not me. I have a thread for my last procedure of 610 grafts taken from my beard. Total repair so far has been roughly 3000 grafts from my beard and 3000 grafts from my chest and abdomen. Here's the posts from my last procedure in December 2021. I haven't updated it in a while. I should probably do a 9 month update in the next week if I get time.

That's with a high hairline. I really would love to lower it just a bit, but I don't know if it's ever going to happen. I need to get a lot more density first. I agree with you. I was just trying to point out that some guys are never going to be able to get 50-60 grafts cm2 in the front and 35 grafts cm 2 in the back. I was sort of responding to the comment that 40cm2 is bad and I was thinking Yeah, but I'd be thrilled if I can get that! LOL

I agree that a better, more useful poll would have been asking anyone who has taken finasteride if you had to stop due to side effects.

So I'm lying when I say it worked the first few years and I think I may have grown back a bit of hair, but then after around the 3 or 4 year mark I started losing hair again? I was on finsasteride for 11 years. I stopped because I was losing hair anyway. I've seen other people on this forum write similar things. What makes you sure we must be liars?

I think I mentioned somewhere else that there are a lot of issues I have with the 10 year study. 1. They are all Japanese men who generally lose hair very slowly throughout their adult life, usually in a diffuse type of pattern, so it should be easier for finasteride to maintain results for a longer time period than say White men simply because their hair loss is slower to begin with. 2. It doesn't say how old any of the men are or how long they have been losing hair. They only give an age range of 20 to 69, but there could be one 20 year old and everyone else over 30. We don't know. If all of the NW 3 and NW 4 men are 45 and up and have been losing hair for 20+ years (see #1 above) then that could make a significant difference if they were all under 30 and losing that much hair in only the last 5 years. 3. They don't give any idea of how much hair the men would have lost without being on finasteride. For example showing family history and rate of baldness. 4. The study claims that the cutoff is NW3 and past that more of the men began losing hair again after the first few years. That totally negates what you are trying to say about how it continues to work... and that is in the study. Put that with #1 and #2 and it is pretty much useless as proof that it continues to work. 5. Out of 532 men only 37 were NW 5, 6,7 while 332 were NW 1, 2, 3, 4, again indicating that there could be a large number of men who lose hair very slowly over a lot of years. I mean why even have NW 1s in the study unless you want to make the overall results look better? These guys aren't even losing hair to begin with. Think about it. If you had few Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises in a study like this the past 10 years then of course you'd show good results. 6. The study was 10 years. While this is a decent length of time, it isn't the rest of your life for someone who starts on finasteride at 21. We still don't know if it will work the same for 30 years, so saying it will work for you forever when you only show a study for 10 years, isn't being honest. 7. This one is where I have a real issue. The rest is all OK, but just doesn't necessarily prove anything, but when they said there were no serious adverse reactions and that all 532 men continued in the study for the entire 10 years.... do you really believe that? Not one person out of 532 had to drop out for erection problems, depression, brain fog, etc? NOT ONE?

I was a NW 7 when I started, but you are missing the point. You said hair isn't bacteria that gets resistant to finasteride. No. It's not getting resistant to finisteride. It's that the enemy genetic forces are eventually able to break though the finasteride wall. Look at it like you're fighting an enemy army. You are on the follicle side and you are fighting DHT. If the DHT is only using bows and arrows then a finasteride wall can maybe hold off that DHT enemy for the rest of your life. But if the DHT enemy is using cannons, a finasteride wall can hold them back for a while, but eventually they will break though and kill all your follicles. So basically if you have very aggressive hair loss you are probably going to lose no matter when you started. If you have mild loss you can hold off the loss a lot longer, maybe the rest of your life for some people. Not everyone will be a NW 7 even at 100 years old while others are NW 7 before 30. Finasteride is going to have a much better effect on the ones who aren't headed to NW 7 too early in life.

This video was only one month afterwards, so a bit of redness is normal. I imagine it got a lot better over the next few months. My redness lasts a few months and even longer on my chest and stomach. Almost no scars at all on my beard after several sessions totaling approximately 3000 beard grafts. There are tiny dots on my chest and stomach/abdomen, but you have to get very close to actually see them and besides that, how many people ever see me without a shirt? I'd much rather have hair on my head where people see it every day rather than a place on my chest and stomach where maybe 20 people see it the entire year. I can go to the beach and nobody can tell. As I said you have to get within a foot or two and look for them to notice. I mean a lot of people have freckles all over their body and they don't have any issues with it. This is nowhere near as bad as that.

This is not true. There have been plenty of cases, myself included, where finasteride worked the first few years and then hair started falling out again. Now perhaps you can claim that it's still working in that the hair is falling out slower than it would have without fin, but I think most people would consider it no longer working if their hair loss starts up again.

I have always disagreed with the statement that you have to lose 50% of your hair before you are noticeably thinning. I think this was a made up thing back in the early days of hair transplants to get men to believe they didn't need a lot of grafts to cover an area because not a lot could be done back then. My first session was 50 grafts and I think the 2nd one was 60 grafts. I was a NW 6 when I had my first hair transplant and was given an estimate of 300 grafts. They weren't follicular units. They were 3.75mm plug grafts, but I was told that with my hair density I would get about 5 to 10 hairs per graft, so this equates to between 1500 to 3000 hairs for a NW 6. There is no way that would even cover the frontal third, but in those days the general public had no idea about this stuff and 3000 hairs sounds like a lot if you don't know anything about hair. I think you actually will have noticeable thinning at around 30% to 40% depending on your hair characteristics. It's very easy to see the 50% number is wrong if you think about it. Someone who has full natural density at 80 FU per cm2 and transplants into a bald frontal area at 40 FU per cm2 is going to look very thin, but that's 50%, so to me it's obviously not correct.

I'm a NW 7 and have about 400cm2 to cover. If I were to average 40 FUs per cm2 of coverage with 50 in the front and 30 in the back I would need 16000 grafts. This is why even though I've done about 6000 body hair grafts I still look extremely thin. That equates to an average of only 15 FU per cm2. Rather depressing 😔

Yes. When I was young and my hair loss was very aggressive I would get a stinging pain in the areas where hair was about to go into a massive shed. Putting my hands through my hair would be very painful. I hated even trying to comb those areas because it would hurt.

I don't know how bad the crown is as there are no pictures from the back and I can't tell how high the hairline is, however I would probably be leaning towards adding grafts throughout the entire area. If you were happy with Bicer then there shouldn't be an issue with going with her again.

very nice

This is totally normal. There's certainly not a "new level" here. Many people with frontal loss have more loss on one side.

If it's only a color difference you can always start coloring your hair. I didn't mind using my gray beard and chest hair because my scalp already had some gray in it and I was coloring it every few months anyway. Now with the beard and chest hair there is a lot more gray and I have to color it once a month instead of once every few months. That minor inconvenience of coloring it more often is worth it to actually have hair growing.

Your hair looks great. If you do the blue line you will almost certainly look like you had a horrible botch job. If you do the red line you will still probably look like you had a botch job. There is very high risk and very low reward in doing what you want. Lately I have seriously been thinking that guys looking to get hair transplants are seeing so many bad hair transplants in their youtube, instagram, etc searching that they begin thinking that those bad hair jobs are what a normal hairline looks like and they start to want a bad job done on themselves without realizing it.

This is the right way to do it. If you see him without ever knowing him before, you would never guess he had anything done. He still has minor recession and didn't get some low, aggressive, completely new hairline that practically nobody over 35 has naturally. More people need to get a "less is more" attitude when it comes to hair restoration.