Al - Moderator

There are several Drs recommended on this site who are located in NY which should be approximately a 4 hour trip from Boston by either car, train, or bus. True & Dorin have an office in Boston with very limited hours (I think one day a week) where they do consultations and follow up, so you could do an in-person consultation in Boston and then schedule the hair transplant at the main office in NY.

You can certainly sit at your computer and do Zoom meetings and any type of computer stuff. The issue is that you are required to use video during the Zoom meeting. If the company doesn't mind you wearing a baseball cap then you should be OK. You don't want to wear a hat all the time too soon after the transplant, but a couple hours on one day is not a big deal. The scabs will be gone within 2 to 3 weeks after the transplant (usually by 2 weeks, but some people are too gentle and it takes them 3 weeks to get the scabs off). You may still be red at the 3 week mark, though. How long it takes for redness to fade differs greatly between patients, so it's hard to say how long that will take. Sometimes it's only a week, but it can take several months. Generally lighter skin people take longer for the redness to fade. If you wear a hat on the beach you should be OK after the first week.

How far post transplant are you? Transplanted hair usually softens up around 18 months to two years. I had extremely greasy hair when I was younger, so I shampooed my hair twice per day a lot of times. If you don't want to do that I don't see an issue with washing your hair with just water at night. Something else you can try since you say you use a lot of product because your hair is too wild is after the workout try shampooing with a conditioner and no shampoo. That should make your scalp feel clean while leaving it more manageable and hopefully require less hair product. Then you can use shampoo at night. You could also try the opposite, using shampoo in the morning after your workout and conditioner at night.

So you should be nearing 4.5 months? If that's correct then for the next two months you should see some nice growth. Good luck.

Yep. I agree with Gatsby. I remember reading about new techniques coming out that would provide unlimited donor hair, so that you can never run out of hair to use. That was in 1989.

You guys are not understanding him. @ced80is not trying to get a full head of hair. He knows he can't get that. He is trying to improve his buzzed hair appearance somewhat so that he doesn't look so bald when it's buzzed short. There is not going to be 3000 grafts taken from the scalp as using beard hair was mentioned. However I'm sure some scalp hair would/should be used for the very frontal hair line area. I think his expectations are very reasonable. Pertaining to the original question: Without knowing who you are actually planning to go to it's impossible to say if that is a better choice than someone else. Cost doesn't tell us much as cost can vary a great deal between different countries. The lowest cost clinic in the one country may be more expensive than some of the best clinics in another country. I would be careful about putting too much at the hairline or trying to make the hairline too much lower. I would try spreading the grafts out over a larger area if you really want to improve the short cut look.

Drs recommended here who perform hair transplants without requiring the recipient area to be shaved include: Dr Robert Dorin (True & Dorin) Dr Robert Bernstein (Bernstein Medical) Dr Bernardino Arocha (Arocha Hair Restoration) Dr Carlos Wesley There may be others, but these are the ones I know of.

Most people are trying to get back to something similar to what they once looked like, so the best thing to do is look at older pictures of yourself when you had more hair. That's the best starting point if you are not sure what type of hairline you want. You can show the Dr the older photos of yourself with hair, so he has an idea of what to do. I don't think letting the Dr completely design your hairline is the right way to go. He doesn't know what you used to look like before you lost your hair. Now, of course, depending on how much hair you have in the photos you show him, he will have to make adjustments, but the idea is to get a similar hairline style as you once had except it may need to be higher. The placement of the hairline is where you let the Dr use more of his judgement and expertise after discussing the hairline style.

swelling usually occurs after a day or two and it lasts 2 to 3 days, so you're looking at possible swelling from day 2 through day 5 or 6. Some people hardly get any and others get it really bad where they can hardly open their eyes. In any case it's gone in less than a week. The swelling doesn't hurt, but you may be hurting in the donor and recipient areas for the first week and after that you can get some lingering itchiness in either the donor or recipient areas.

You can probably do that, but you needed to let it heal more first. I really think most of your issue is you started buzzing/shaving it too soon. It's like when you have a cut and the scab starts forming and you pick the scab off too soon and you start bleeding where the scab was. This could be sort of the same thing. Leave it alone for a little while and see if it looks like it's improving.

There are too many factors to know for sure how well your scar will turn out. If you had a really great scar that's almost non existent, then it's very likely that the next one will not be as good because if you have the best then the only place to go is down, however you also know that your scar heals very well, so even if it's worse it probably won't be bad as you will likely get a similar type of healing. It also depends on how many grafts you are trying to get. If you stay at a smaller number of grafts than the first one and not try to max out how wide of a strip can be taken then you will put yourself in a better position to have a good scar as opposed to trying to get as wide an area to get the most possible grafts. There are plenty of other factors too. Is it the same Dr, How much scalp laxity you still have, How long after the first procedure are you doing the 2nd one (scalp laxity after a HT continues to improve over the years, so it's better if it several years later), etc, etc

Be careful about areas you think you don't care about. Is it really because you don't care about crown loss or are you fooling yourself into thinking you don't care about it because you don't have much loss there to worry about NOW. What happens if you fill in the front, but in a few years you have a large bald crown? Think back to when you were maybe 17 years old. You probably didn't worry about your frontal hair loss then either, but that's because you didn't have any loss there to worry about. Now that you have hair loss in the front, you are concerned about it and you get more anxious and worried about it as it gets worse. Don't just assume you won't feel the same about crown loss if it starts falling out rapidly. Just something to think about as you plan you hair transplants.

You can put beard and chest grafts into a depleted donor area. Check out @mustang thread here:

It looks like you are buzzing the area and irritating it. You need to leave it alone for a week or two.

I've seen several examples of having a hair transplant in the front and wearing a hair system behind it. It works very well for certain people because if you can get the front hairline to look real then nobody suspects that you are wearing a hair system. The further back you are able to get real/transplanted hair the better it works. For example if you're a NW 6 and don't have enough donor to transplant your entire head, then leaving the crown bald and using a hair system just for the crown is an option. Then some years later when you are older and not so worried about having a thin crown you can get rid of the hair piece and maybe put a small amount of grafts there, so it isn't completely bald. This is a good long term plan for certain younger high NW guys who really want full hair when they are younger.

All of them.

As others have said there are several excellent Drs in the NY area. I understand that time constraints can sometimes be an issue. Many of us have faced that issue as well. However please realize that the effects of a poor procedure done at the desired time frame now can last many years as opposed to only a few months of bad timing done the right way. With that said I don't know anything about Dr Wolfeld to say if he is any good or not.

I'm going to give you my suggestion which will probably be different than anyone else. If you can get about 2400 beard and chest grafts then use those and leave the scalp donor alone for now. Put 2200 in the crown and just 200 in the front, but keeping them a good distance behind the current hairline just to try to make the frontal area not so see through. Why do this? It lets you get an idea of where you are after it grows in without touching any more scalp donor grafts, so you will still have some scalp donor left for later for you to decide where you need/want them more. You want to see how well the beard and chest grafts grow, so you know where to use the remaining scalp grafts that you haven't touched yet. It puts a small amount of grafts near the front just to give you some frontal thickening, so it isn't too see thorough. Some others will say 200 is not enough, but you don't want to put more up front without getting enough behind it. You already look too front loaded. Get some behind it first. You will only be using 2400 grafts, so the cost savings compared to using 3000 to 3500 may allow you to go to a better clinic as you said you couldn't afford it. You can then save up some money for the next procedure while the first one is growing.

I slept in a recliner chair the first few nights. I did try sleeping propped up in bed with several pillows behind me like you mention, but that was harder to stay upright and harder to fall asleep. Either way, get a neck pillow. It will make sure you can't end up sleeping on the grafts even if you toss and turn and don't stay upright while asleep. I prefer a button front or tie front pillow because that makes sure your head and neck stay in the right position better.

If you can do that then it is much easier to deal with it, but some people don't have that option due to their job. I have to meet hundreds of people daily, some of them I see regularly and some of them are strangers and I have to be wearing a suit jacket and tie with no head covering allowed.

I know a few years ago he was in the $7.50 to 7.75 range.

They post that like it's a good thing!? What is wrong with these clinics?

I'd say 4 to 5 nights.

There are a number of men who end up shaving their heads after having a hair transplant and the ones I've seen seem to have very little to no noticeable scarring, so it should be very similar if you had grafts put into your beard area and then shave the beard later. If you can't find examples of shaved beards then at least try to find some examples of shaved heads after a transplant.

I think most people get depressed in the first few months after a hair transplant. People generally get a hair transplant because they are beginning to get depressed about their hair, so when you start getting shock loss and look worse than you did before the transplant it makes sense that it will really bring some people down. You just have to push through it for a few months and try not to let it get to you. It will generally be about 5 months before it starts to look better than it did pre transplant, so while it takes a year or more to get the full results, it doesn't take nearly that long to get some good improvement from the starting point.