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. ------------------------------------------------

Propecia (Finasteride) isn't harmless but it's also rarely ever as bad as the cases on websites like that. There are people complaining about all sorts of medications on those sites and claiming all sorts of stuff was caused. (I remember one guy claimed that Propecia turned him GAY.) Read enough of that stuff and you can scare yourself away from taking meds that you've already been tolerating fine for years. I won't bullsh*t you, the Propecia side effects are real. And they're probably a lot more common than the 2% figure the maker claims it to be. But just from hanging around the hair-loss web community and talking to others, I find it most common that the negative effects quickly reverse themselves as soon as the drug is discontinued. Most guys in the hair loss community seem to feel the stuff is a valid option that should be on the market, although they'd also like to quit it as soon as something better comes in the future. The cases of the SERIOUS stuff (irreversible sides, wiener shrinking, etc) are still extremely rare. The manufacturer says they don't exist but I tend to believe that at least a few of them do. In every one of those cases that I can recall, the guys readily admitted that they felt plenty of warnings. You almost always read that they felt serious side effects right away, but stayed on the drug for months after their bodies were already telling them they should probably quit the stuff. It's all a risk. Just like most everything else in life. -------------------------------------------------

That's the whole story of the hair transplant industry. Everyone can only lose a certain amount of hair from the "donor area" before it becomes too obvious to take any more from it and the transplants have to stop. If you go totally bald later in life, then your transplantable hair may "run out" before your balded-areas are covered again and leave you with an unnatural appearance. For some men with the most extensive balding patterns, it's simply not wise to get any HTs whatsoever because they can't cover their heads well enough to make it worth it. They decide that their appearance is better off just shaving their whole head down short than trying to wear an extremely thin transplanted look. (The shave-down is no longer an option once you get your first strip-style HT because the line-scar will obviously show without any hair growing in the donor area to hide it.) This whole issue is why you need to have some sort of idea about predicting your FINAL lifetime hair loss before you get your FIRST hair transplant session. The whole decision to get HTs is a risk. You're betting that your future baldness won't progress far enough to make you prefer a shaved-down look instead of the eventual results of the HT work. HTs are not something to take lightly. The decision to get the first one has to be made with an educated guess about the baldness situation you'll probably have several decades from now. And your "donor hair" is always precious. When any of it gets wasted on a bad choice of surgeons (or bad decisions about hairline locations, etc) then those hairs are gone. There's no getting them back no matter how much money reimbursement and/or future HT surgeries that you might be able to get. ------------------------------------------------

If the strip-scar is not tolerable to you then you're left with FUE-style transplant work. It often doesn't have the graft-survival rates quite as high as a strip-surgery, but it's been steadily improving for several years now. It's very expensive because of the added time & effort though. Typically double the price of an equivalent strip-HT. Right now FUE work is really not even equal to a strip-HT in a lot of ways, but the whopper issue of the scarring is where it shines. Think of a doctor using a big needle, putting the hole of the needle over a hair on the back of your head, and poking out that little bit of skin in the needle's tip that produces the hair. Then he sticks that bit of skin into the front for a transplant. FUE work isn't exactly 100% like this description, but you get the idea. The doc basically pokes out random hairs all over the back/sides of your head with special tools to "thin" the whole area a little bit rather than remove it all from one big strip of harvested skin. The tools are generally extracting 0.7-0.9mm bits of skin. With a good doc and decent healing, you'll end up with a big field of 1-mm sized "dots" of faint scar tissue at the worst. If you later shaved your whole head with an electric beard razor and then let it grow out for about a day's worth of new stubble, then it would usually be undetectable. FUE is definitely still a scarring procedure. (And it has been argued that FUE work is at least as extensive as a strip-HTs in total area because most of the strip'd skin is being removed in the process.) But the FUE scars are visually easier to hide with shorter haircuts, and there's never the large open wound like with strip-HT work. -------------------------------------------------

Don't bet on genetics alone to save you. Look for miniaturization all over your head. My father is in his 60's with a NW#2.5 his entire adult life. Both gandfathers had NW#2s at death. My father's brother is a NW#1 in his 50s. But I'm worse than all of them in my late 20's with a NW#3 that will eventually be a NW#4-5A. ------------------------------------------------

I'd rather just have the stuff in a pill than have it on a time release that's so long. The pills are already basically an every-other-day thing if you want them to be. --------------------------------------------------

Just wait until something better than Fin/Dut comes along. When that finally happens, let's see how many people are remarking about being glad there's finally a hair loss treatment w/o any sexual sides. I'll bet the number of times that issue is commented upon will be WAY over 1-2% of the current & former Fin users. ------------------------------------------------

There are a small number of guys in the hair loss community who have reported permanent sexual problems from Finasteride. IMHO it is not a common thing at all, but it has happened before. The percentage of Fin users who are getting sexual side effects has been the topic of so many discussions all over the MPB world . . . just start searching the subject and you'll get a deluge of talk. There is a WIDESPREAD feeling in the MPB world that the 1-2% statistic is totally understating the size of this problem. The studies that produced the 1-2% figure didn't include any results from those who withdrew from the trials for "undisclosed reasons." There's nothing especially unusual about that practice in theory. But in this particular case, one could suppose that the "undisclosed reasons" category might include a lot of guys who were embarrassed to admit that the Fin was causing sexual problems. I agree with those who think Fin's sexual sides are under-reported. I might guess that the real sexual side effects percentage is 10-20%. Could be more. ------------------------------------------------

Here's something that might prove relevant to the issue. It's an article about some of the work that Androscience's big-brain researcher has been doing: http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/news/story.cfm?id=1436 Here's the part that I find most interesting: If this applies to follicle receptors too, then it would mean that the receptors in our hair follicles could eventually begin triggering themselves from other (non-DHT) signals if they're deprived of their standard DHT-signal for long enough. That could neatly explain why some guys' hair seems to abruptly outsmart the Finasteride after having been consistently shut down by it for a number of years. -------------------------------------------------

I totally agree. SCS, The idea that you "won't care so much when you're older" is one of the oldest rationalizations in the book for getting early HTs. Unfortunately, what really happens is that the guy rarely EVER loses the want for decent hair at some magic age. There are a lot of 50-60yo men who get HTs every single day of the year. If you're the type of person who cares enough to want to get surgery over this hairline when you're young, then you're the type of person who is very unlikely to adjust very well to losing hair when you're older either. (I'm not saying it will be quite as hard as it is at 17, but I am saying that you won't exactly be fine with it. And you'll probably want to do ANYTHING to improve the situation then, just like now.) Believe me, the ages of 30-35yo is not much "older" mentally-speaking. When to comes to our appearances, there isn't some magic age where everyone's thought processes will adjust to grownup-mode. (I'm sure there was once a time when you thought 17 sounded like a total grownup. But it doesn't seem all that grownup NOW, does it?) ------------------------------------------------

Cloning hair has been "just a few years away from the commercial market" for at least 20 years now. I think the first hair follicle was cloned in a lab something like 30+ years ago. They MIGHT be closer now than in the past, but don't bet your looks on it. There were guys getting aggressive HTs back in the 1980s & 1990s because hair loss was about to be "cured" according to plenty of respected news sources. And now those poor guys are really screwed over despite making an informed decision to the best of their abilities at the time. They're often stuck trying to cover increasingly large bald heads with more & more surgeries, sometimes even running out of donor hair & having to resort to hairpieces, etc. It's not pretty. The hair loss/cloning researchers always throw out estimates for their new advances that are, uh, "optimistic" so that the money-lenders will keep funding their work. If they came right out & said "we won't have jack squat on the market for another couple of decades" then they couldn't ever raise the money to do it at all. (That's just the nature of most medical research these days, hair loss or otherwise.) Transplanting synthetic hair & other people's hair have been tried already. Doesn't work, looks like crap, gets infected, the body rejects it, etc. The whole baldness problem is happening in the first place because your body tries to reject your own hair follicles once the DHT has hit them. Transplanting anything other than a patient's own hair follicles has proved to be a losing game. Men have been wanting a cure for baldness for thousands of years. It's EXTREMELY frustrating that it's 2007 and we still don't have it, but that's the situation. Just like we still don't have a cure for the common cold. And we still don't have a vaccine for the AIDS virus. And we still can't wipe out cancer. And on, and on, and on. There have been literally billions of dollars invested in preventing/treating/reversing hair loss over the last several decades. Most of us do believe that we will eventually get a real option for treating this problem within another couple of decades, but we're simply not close enough to know yet. It absolutely sucks donkey sh*t and it's hard to believe that this problem could possibly be so hard for science to solve, but that really is the situation that we're still in. There are still a hell of a lot of millionaires & billionaires walking around with bald heads & bad hairpieces every day. If hair loss could really be dealt with that easily, they wouldn't look like that. -------------------------------------------------