Al - Moderator

I will add that this doesn't mean they won't shave your head. They may still do that, but seeing you with some length and how you normally comb your hair allows them to plan better prior to starting.

It allows them to see the direction the hair grows, the way it falls, and how and to what degree it covers your head. For example if you have a wave in your hair it may cover differently than if your hair is very straight and that can determine where to best place more grafts and where they can get away with using less grafts for best overall coverage and look.

Most Drs require shaving of the recipient area, but some don't. You should ask Drs about this to find one that doesn't require shaving if that's what you are looking for. I know Dr Dorin at True & Dorin in NY does not require shaving. I THINK Dr Arocha doesn't require shaving either, but I could be wrong on that one.

one more point I forgot to mention. When members get banned we only see what they post publicly on the forums. Sometimes there is also a lot of private messaging going on which includes harassment and threats. When this gets brought to the moderators attention the moderator may give a warning if it doesn't seem extremely bad. Sometimes after the warning the foul language and harassment in private messages continues. Sometimes member A will start posting in member B threads to purposely disrupt member B posts because they didn't like what member B posted in member A threads earlier. This you may not notice if you don't read every topic. So just because you read some things and then someone gets banned don't just assume it's only due to what they wrote in the thread you are currently reading.

I'm not going to go back and read this entire thread, so I'll make some general comments. 1. With many things in life it's easy to look back and see what could have or should have been done differently. Just because it may be obvious to many people after the fact, doesn't mean it would have been obvious while it was in the process of happening. 2. Hair transplants aren't an exact science. It's not Walmart or Amazon. You can't simply buy a certain amount of hair and get exactly what you ordered delivered to your head and growing. It's surgery. It may not work on one person as well as it worked on another person. Everyone needs to remember that and base their decisions on that. 3. Over the time I've been here I've seen several formerly recommended Drs removed from recommendation for no longer doing work that is up to the forums standards. However, it wouldn't be right for this forum to remove any recommended Dr simply because someone posts a bad review or claims to have had a bad experience, especially if it's a new user. There's no easy way to know if the poster is just making it up or not. Even if they post pictures it's not guaranteed that the pictures are of themselves. The moderators almost always ask for more info that can be given privately in order to follow up with the Dr about the case. 4. I've seen the moderators ask the members opinions of whether certain Drs should be recommended here or not. This means that we as members do get to at least give our opinions on recommendation before the Dr is listed. How many forums would do that? 5. Some Drs may have been doing great work at some point and earned their recognition. Sometimes things change. Maybe they don't keep up with technology and what may have been good techniques years ago no longer are, maybe they just begin to care more about the business and less about the patients, maybe it's something else. Whatever it is, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have been recommended in the first place at the time they were. As long as the forum moderators remove them from recommendation when it's proven that they no are no longer consistently performing quality hair transplants then they are doing the right thing. As I mentioned earlier, it's always easy to look back and say the timing should have been sooner, but as long as this forum and moderators are actively working to give us the best hair transplant experience then that is all we should be asking for. Remember as members we don't pay anything for this service.

If you think that once you reach 50 you will no longer care what you look like then the one living in denial is you. Even the men who shave their head when they get older do it because they care what they look like. Most NW 6 and up guys don't want to look like they are doing an extreme comb over, so they shave it all. Even the horseshoe fringe hair around the back and sides look is not in style like it was 30 years ago, so most men don't want that either. Trust me, men shave their heads because they care about what they look like. Even if they don't like the shaved head look it might be a better option in their eyes than doing a comb over or having that horseshoe hair look. You also aren't thinking that men who had multiple hair transplants over the years starting when they were much younger have a lot of scars, so shaving their heads isn't exactly going to make them look better than not shaving. I am also 53 years old just like Gatsby is and I started my hair transplants when I was 22. I have multiple strip scars, so shaving my head, while technically is an option, I will never look like an ordinary guy who simply shaved his head.

If you start out losing hair fast then at some point in the future it has to go slower. There's very little chance of it speeding up after some point since it's already going fast. It also can't continue at the same rate forever because you will run out of hair, so that means you can make a good bet that it will slow down at some point. Does that mean anything? No. Read the next part for why. Lets say you start off with 100,000 hairs and start losing you hair and you lose 10% (10,000 hairs) the first year, so you have 90,000 left. The next year you lose 11% (9,900 hairs) and have 80,100 left. The next year you lose 12% (9,612 hairs) and have 70,488 left. Are you losing more hair each year because the percentage is going up or are you losing less hair each year because the actual amount of hair lost each year is going down? It all depends on how you count it, but what should be obvious after a while is that if you start out with a fast rate of hair loss it will not possible to keep losing the same amount of hair every year for an extended number of years because the supply of hair will not be there.

Looks great for 4 months.

I wasn't trying to be charitable to the clinic. I just didn't want to agree that the clinic was in error without knowing all the details. If the rest of what you said in your post responding to mine is true then I agree with you that the clinic should have done a much better job. Thank you for giving us more details. I'm thinking his first mistake was way underestimating how many grafts you would need and then the mistakes got worse as he couldn't give you what was told to you with 3500 grafts when he probably should have explained to you that you would need a lot more than he first suggested now that he is looking at you again and then plan from there with you on what to do. That makes it sound like a bait and switch tactic to get you in and then tell you you need 2000 more grafts, but that would have been better than continuing while you are thinking everything was good.

You haven't posted whether you requested grafts in the crown or not. That can completely change what happened. If you were seeking overall coverage with the crown included then I don't see an major issue. Your hair loss was going to take much more than 3500 grafts to complete, so it was going to take 2 hair transplants assuming the Drs limit for a session is in the 3500 range. You can elect to only do the front portion in the first one and the crown in the second one or you can try to get as much area covered in the first one and then go over the area again to thicken it all up in the second one. As for your statement that you never see a case where Drs fall short of grafts.... well that happens a lot. There are plenty of cases where two transplants are planned (as I just mentioned) in order to get the desired result because the Dr can't do enough grafts in one transplant.

From looking at the pictures your hair looks better now than it did 11 years ago in 2009, so I don't know why you're having an issue. Everyone's hair is going to look different under different lighting conditions. You can never change that no matter how much you try to do something about it.

What is making you think you are balding? We can't tell anything from the pictures posted, but it looks fine from what I can see.

That's how they advertise such fast shipping. Their trucks are already on the road getting it to you as you place your order. LOL

My first hair transplant was 31 years ago, so I know what you mean. Back in those days the punch sizes were much larger, so they would have to bandage your entire head before you went home. Then you go back the next day to remove the bandage, clean the area, and replace it with a new bandage that you remove yourself at home. So yeah when you had to go to the bathroom it was a problem and they had to do a quick temporary bandage, so you wouldn't bleed all over. These days the punch sizes are so small that there's very little bleeding and it's not a problem to take a few breaks whenever you need to. You'll even get a lunch break. Where I go they let you order from a takeout menu before the operation starts and then they order it later and when it comes everyone takes a lunch break. Dr Dorin usually has a consultation scheduled either late morning or early afternoon, so they basically put in one of the bathroom breaks or lunch break at that time, so he can do the consultation plus give his fingers a break from doing the extractions as well. Breaks are really not an issue in todays hair transplants.

Same with both. Plenty of people post lengthy transplant experience details with multiple photos the day after the procedure. If you're doing work on the computer and taking phone calls you shouldn't have any major problems with that. You probably won't feel like doing much the day after the procedure, but past that you should be fine. I walked 3 blocks to the hotel right after my hair transplant and the next day I walked back to the clinic for cleaning and then back to the hotel and then to the bus station to take a 2.5 hour bus ride home and then walked 4 blocks from the bus station to where my car was parked and then drove a few miles.

It just happens to be a popular style on guys now. I imagine even more on some younger guys who have a new hairline from a hair transplant and been wanting to be able to comb their hair that way for a while and are tired of trying to hide their balding, receding, thinning hairline.

Yes. You can move some of the hair under your chin to other areas of your beard.

Use a conditioner when you take a shower. Let it stay in your hair for a few minutes.

You know what Melvin, I took a look at some of them and it looks like they have been changed since I last saw them, so never mind what I said.... and great job with the forum.

I think someone needs to really spend some time to go through all of the Drs listed and update their bios and info. The last time I really checked it looked like some of them were really dated. I realize that it's mostly up to the Drs to update their own info, but perhaps you should send them a link or something to easily allow them to view it and update it.

Yes! I hate when 3 people quote all of the pictures that were posted. I really don't need to keep seeing the same results while I keep scrolling to get to the end. I usually try to select a section I'm responding to and quote that. I wish more people would do that. Thanks!

Redness varies a great deal. Some people don't have any redness after a week or two and others will still have lingering redness for 6 months. Usually lighter skin with lighter hair gets the most and longest lasting redness. If you have an olive colored skin and dark hair you may not have much redness, but it varies. As for shaving the donor, with FUT they will only shave a strip of hair where they will be taking the strip out, so once they sew or staple you up you can usually hide it if you let your hair grow long enough. It's easier to cover with your hair once you get the sutures or staples out after about 12 days because it's just so much easier combing it then.

Some men are happy even if they only get a small amount of hair back because it gives them a feeling that they were able to do something about their hair loss and they are no longer losing the battle. They are no longer helpless to it. It's like if you are in a war and the enemy keeps advancing and you have to continually retreat, but then one day you are able to hold them off and maybe even gain a small amount of ground back. Sure you still lost a lot of territory overall, but the feeling of finally stopping their advance is like a big win and you feel like maybe the war is finally starting to go in your favor. The morale increases and you no longer feel like you are in a lost cause.

I don't understand why people would want to leave the forum based on one or two threads that they don't like or due to one or two people posting who they don't agree with. The simple solution is to stop reading and posting on that thread and/or stop responding to the person you don't agree with if you get offended by anything they say to you. If you think that there is no possibility of anyone having any opinions that differ from yours than the problem is you and not them. If you get offended by a topic, but keep posting on the same topic then again the problem is you not someone else. Stop getting offended by everything. This goes for everyone. I'm not singling anyone out. If everyone would stop getting offended by someone elses opinion and stop calling each other names for no reason then there wouldn't be a problem. It always amazes me when the ones who get the most upset about how they are being treated are usually the ones doing the most name calling.

If you're working from home and don't care what you look like and it doesn't include any strenuous activity then you can probably be back to work in 2 days.