calvinmd

People talk all day long about how important looks have become in this society. And when it comes to most issues in the first 2/3 of your life, I think looks are AT LEAST as important as people think they are if not more. I agree that the issue is not just with young women. It's relevant to ALL people of both genders. I think the most important improvement is to go from having more hair loss than average for your age, and then get HT'd down to a more average level of loss appearance. IMHO if you're under age 50, and you can afford to live in a $100,000 house, and you can afford to drive cars/trucks that you paid at least $10-15K for, then HTs are totally justifiable costs. That's not aiming very high on the income scale; I'm basically just saying you can justify HTs if you can do any unnessecary multi-thousand-dollar spending at all.

Hairs get shock-lost because they were damaged during the HT process and/or they were already too mortally wounded by MPB to survive the minor trauma of decent HT work nearby. Get a good HT doctor, and just assume that severely-miniaturized hairs in the recipient areas will be lost in some percentage. This might make the first HT less rewarding, but the eventual HT process will recoup your losses if you plan accordingly and keep expectations in check. HTs are about long-term gratification over the course of years. ------------------------------------------------

If this works, I rest assured that there WILL be more than enough demand for it to be done perfectly. The demand is overwhelming and I don't think even the highest estimates will be high enough once a real cure for MPB becomes publicly known. Bosley couldn't possibly monopolize it while producing compromised work. --------------------------------------------------

So much depends on what you expect from the work. Hair characteristics do have a lot to do with it, and so do the groupings of the grafts. Of course 1&2-hair grafts are only half as effective as 3&4-hair grafts in terms of raw density gains. I personally want an honest no-MPB appearance at least in the frontal transplanted area, and I think even the "1000 grafts for each NW level" is probably not high enough for my expectations. -------------------------------------------------

Multiple blades in the initial cut are nothing more than trading lost hairs in exchange for speeding up the procedure a little. More blades equals more transection (read: loss) of transplantable hairs during the cut. The grafts should be divided up by hand once the strip sections have been removed. --------------------------------------------------

There are so many "possible future treatments" that it's hard to believe that NONE of them will pan out. Just the raw odds seem to indicate that there will be some decent progress on MPB in the next decade or two. We're all just waiting to see which ones it will be and how well they'll ultimately work. --------------------------------------------------

The big visible donor-scar is not present with a FUE procedure. That helps shorten the recovery time when you're looking the worst. However, there is still the lingering redness while things heal up (in both the donor and recipient areas), and there is the several-month wait for the transplanted hairs to begin growing again. These things are issues with FUE just as much as with strip HTs. With either method, the FINAL & best appearance of the transplanted hair isn't gonna be showing up for at least a year. Hair transplants are a long process. ------------------------------------------------

Bill speaks the truth about Dr. A as far as I'm concerned. His results look twice as good as most any other doc out there at first glance. But IMHO he doesn't truly do significantly "better" HTs than any of the other top docs, he just specializes in doing more risky ones. Dr. A deserves a reputation for having great surgical results, but his reputation widely believed to be built on a lot of unsustainable HTs. Many of the other top docs would probably be showing before/after shots just as beautiful if they were willing to consume donor hair at the rate that Armani does. Dr. A is also extremely "generous" with estimations of remaining donor hair. So much that a lot of guys are probably getting suckered into HTs that they might otherwise think twice about. Armani claims 10-15,000 grafts are "average," and he might even be able to poke 15,000 holes in a patient's head. But he can't make a donor zone look normal for the rest of the patient's life when 15,000 grafts have been pulled. He's not God. People's donor areas aren't any bigger in his office than in anyone else's. ------------------------------------------------

4000 grafts would do it with just a thin coverage that you probably won't be very satisfied with. 6000-7000 grafts will do it and make it look really thick and teenage. It varies from case-to-case a lot. These are just rough guidelines. Almost everyone would like more donor grafts than they've got, even those who have gotten 7000+ grafts transplanted. ------------------------------------------------

The stuff about "unnatural hairlines" and "pluggy looking grafts" are related to older HT methods that the good docs won't mess with. The stuff about donor scarring & young HTs & running out of donor hair before the job is finished is just as relevant now as it was 10 or 20 years ago. Finasteride has worked to brighten the outlook and reduced the odds of at least some of these situations. (Among those who can tolerate the stuff, anyway.) The posters on those messages are almost all gonna have weathered their 20s & 30s without any DHT blockers, and that's by far the worse time for hair damage. -------------------------------------------------

You're right to be concerned about permanent sexual side effects. You'd be a moron NOT to be concerned about that as soon as you read the first case of it happening with any drug that you're considering taking. But you're also right to be concerned about all kinds of things from any medication, surgery, etc. Heck, even if you were to get a HT right now, there's always a risk of an infected donor area wound, and permanent sensitivity/pain in the area, nerve damage, etc. I think there's even been a case of a guy actually dying during a HT surgery in California. My point is not to talk about HTs, my point is to say that the risk of taking medications should be rationally weighed against all the factors. There are some guys who've said that they didn't take Finasteride for X number of years because they were scared of the side effects. Then their hair got so bad that they couldn't stand it any longer and they tried Propecia. It worked, and now they're kicking themselves for not starting it sooner. I'm just saying don't make a knee-jerk decision either way. It's not wise to take Propecia impulsively, but you also might someday live to regret an impulsive decision not to take it either. ------------------------------------------------

It "works" immediately at a chemical level, but it's gonna take a while to see anything. The common saying is this: "You get some results after 6 months, but give it at least a year before you decide it's not working. And then things may still be gradually improving after that for another 6 months or even a year." This set of figures is pretty common across the hair loss world, actually. It's about the same thing for a HT to grow out too. -----------------------------------------------

The poster has said he "already got a HT" a while ago. There have been some guys in the HT community who got several HTs done after feeling committed with the first one, and then actually regretted the later ones. The first hair-mill disaster HT may not do much good, but the scar may not be huge yet by megassion standards because the crap mills like to do those little 1200-graft jobs all the time. I've read at least a couple of guys saying they got multiple HTs, and later kinda wished they had just shaved-down and exposed their first strips-scar because it seems pretty small compared to the later ones in retrospect. Maybe this doesn't apply to this case. I dunno. But I thought I'd mention it since NW#7s are a pretty bleak outcome in general and this is all a lesser-of-evils situation. Scar-revisions with trico-closures and later FUEs into the scar can do a lot to reduce the appearance of a small hair-mill job. We all know this stuff won't get rid of the scar's appearance entirely, but it can sometimes reduce it to a pretty minor thing instead of an attention-getter from across the room. And that Juvista stuff is most likely gonna do even more for scar-healing in a few years. ------------------------------------------------

F--k it. I say tell her. She can be bothered by it or not but it's more trouble than it's worth to keep it from her. I don't see what the big deal is about admitting to hair loss or getting HTs as long as the work is professional and the results are gonna be good when they're grown out. The fact is that society values better/younger appearances as much as a lot of educational degrees. A HT, especially a major one during the first half of your life, is a career & romantic investment that's justifiable with cold hard logic as far as I'm concerned. I've gotten cut up several times to fix my teeth, I've gotten cut up to breathe through my nose better, I've gotten cut up to fix a broken arm . . . might as well get cut up to fix my hair too. -------------------------------------------------

BHT's have been occasionally done for several years already. But the results remain inconsistent (and also very un-cost-effective). I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. Better medical treatments for scalp hair loss will probably hit the market sooner than BHTs would have ever become very reliable & common. ------------------------------------------------