QuestionForThoseIn_NorthEast

[phl]

You should have included Dr Beehner. Without question I would pick him. He is a highly qualified and caring doctor. You should have a consult with him in Saratoga Springs, NY. Definitely not MHR!

 

[This message was edited by phl on July 23, 2003 at 12:33 PM.]

[PD]

phl,

 

I sure would have included but there were only 5 choices !! Check my post today "all you wanna konw about MHR - boston" God, these guys are turning out to be Bosley of this decade !

[Guest]

I'm in the north-east, and I would go to dr. Feller (FUE and high density).

 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic''. Arthur C. Clarke

[PD]

Microprose,

 

Have you had an FUE ?? Has anyone else on this forum you know of did ? Whats your opinion about FUE in comparison with FUT ? I feel its still a little too early to say the technology is mature..

[Franklin]

I have had Fue and after receiving 3 strips the procedures are like night and day.Don't be to concerned about location you want the best for your particular situation.And my Fue doctor has lots of results and has been doing it for years.Oh and as far as Dr.Benmer I hope he is not the same doctor Behmer from Saratoga springs N.Y who I saw on the discovery channel last night.I consider myself a expeirienced ht patient since going through both procedures and Dr.Behmer used a 4 bladed knife to take out the donor strip how outdated.And he also performs beard hair transplants which I was unfortunate to see on this poor man that had a huge scar and had to have it repaired from doctor Woods.Please Do your homework.

[Guest dude1]

This may have been an old documentary - it's at least a couple of years old. Does anyone know if Dr. Beehner still uses a four-bladed knife and if he does what are the disadvantages? I've read many posts on this forum from Dr Beehner patients.

As to the beard, I don't remember seeing this.

 

Would one of his patients like to comment?

[Dr. Michael Beehner]

Like a few of my colleagues who have had to jump in and defend their professional reputations from time to time, I feel it is probably necessary for me to do so now.

Regarding the Discovery Show, it was mostly filmed in 1998-99, 5 years ago, and it was planned so that the patient on the show could have three surgeries and then be flown several months later after the last procedure to L.A. for some photos. Because of production pressures, we did the second procedure only 3 1/2 months after the first one, whereas I have a minimal interval of 6 months presently. We did take three 3mm strips in that patient's donor harvest (which does require four blades), but presently only take double strips of 4-5mm width each, which allows the cutters working under the microscopes to do plenty of slivering to isolate follicular units, but isn't as deep a slivering cut as those who cut out a single elipse. If I see any variation in direction of the hairs at the top of the strip with the bottom level, I immediately use a single knife and cut each side individually, following the angle of the hair there. An intersting follow-up to the Discovery Show is that a woman from Boston watched the show a couple of years ago, called her best friend and told her to turn on the TV, that she thought that was the man for her. She couldn't get through to the Discovery people, but a year later, by chance in the midst of 40,000 runners at the NY Marathon, happened to meet him and they are a serious twosome today. A little "Sleepless in Seattle"!

The above isn't what provoked me to answer here in this forum. Rather, I would hope that my reputation doesn't rest on one discontented beard harvest patient. The patient in question had virtually no available donor hair, begged me to find hair somewhere else if I could (even once asked us to harvest peri-anal hair! - which we kindly refused. In fact, my whole staff said they would quit if I even considered such a deed.), and after the two sessions with beard hair looked quite good compared to how he looked when he first presented to us. He was made aware at the outset that this was a relatively new procedure and that there would be a scar under the chin after the procedure. I first saw a good result with this method at our 1999 San Francisco meeting by a doctor from that area in a patient who had no left-over scalp donor hair. We have done a total of 8 procedures on 5 patients, three of whom are committed to wearing beards their whole lives (always have in the past and always will), so the scar is not an issue. My opinion, after performing these 8 cases, a topic on which I have lectured in Europe (Berlin) this past summer, and at the Orlando Live Surgery Workshop, is that it is advisable to use beard hair as donor ONLY when the patient is committed to having a beard the rest of his life to hide his scar, and to only place the hairs in the central area of the scalp, never near the periphery, such as at the hairline.

The spirit in which I try new ideas, such as beard harvesating, is to see if they are helpful for my patients and will benefit my profession. As examples, three years ago I came up with a procedure for elevating an overly flat flap hairline or translanted hairline, which many doctors now use. I have worked on various variations of frontal forelock designs for the extremely bald man for many years. I do at least two to three research projects a year in hair transplantation. The patients are fully informed of what is going on, and I think the information has enriched my profession.

Too often on these sites, a given doctor will get "tagged" with a certain label by persons who know nothing of the quality of his work. I think that if the participants on this and other forums were more respectful and tolerant to different opinions expressed by doctors here, that more doctors would participate and the exchange of ideas here would be more informative. All that having been said, I fully respect the right of "free press" and for a little rough and tumble "give and take" here.

If anyone wants to communicate with me personally off of this board regarding any of these commments, feel free to do so (e-mail address available on website)

Mike Beehner, M.D.

[Guest]

Dr. Beehner,

Thank you for your input on this thread and many others that you have responded to. I understand your point about doctors getting "tagged" on these internet forums, but I think you can easily understand why that could happen. You've seen the bad work time and time again. We all have. These people were all duped. Of course, if they knew what they were getting into, they wouldn't have chosen to go that route, but this industry is full of half truths and lies. Therefore, we all have to be very skeptical when making decisons. Unfortunately, until the industry gets cleaned up, it will probably continue. I'm making no judgements on you or your work in any way. I never seen your work in person, but your pictures look good. I just wanted you to see this from the patients perspective. Thanks for all of your help and participation thus far.

 

One other thing - could you please elaborate on why you feel using a multi bladed knife is better than a single? Wouldn't it cause more transection? (blades cutting over follicular units rather than in between them). Does the use of the multi bladed knife have a history of producing wider scars?

[PD]

Dr. Beehner,

 

Thanks for stepping in to explain! Most of us on this website understand that there might be an unhappy patient even with the best of the best doctors in the world (which i personally believe is mostly caused by too much of expectations by patient or some miscommunication.) That doesnt lessen the reputation of a good doctor like you.

 

I am also interested in the answer to the question posed by ts808.

[Guest]

Dr.Beehner,

Thanks for answering my questions. I am still unclear on how you could cut with a 3 bladed knife and not transect. Isn't the idea to go in between the FU's? It doesn't seem logical that one or two of the baldes would "match up".I mean no disrepect by asking this, I'm just trying to understand your method. Thanks.

[phl]

Doctor Beehner,

 

Thanks for your remarks regarding the width of the donor strips for 2nd and 3rd procedures. It answers a question we briefly touched on in an earlier email. As you can appreciate there are many questions that we as prospective surgery patients think of that are perhaps routine knowledge to the doctor. I believe it is important for the patient to be as informed as possible and your website and contributions of yourself and other doctors to this forum help tremendously.

 

[This message was edited by phl on August 04, 2003 at 12:49 PM.]

[PD]

Dr. Beehner,

 

Thank you sir for your patient and long post. But i didnt find the actual reason why you want to use multi-bladed knife. Agreed that it doesnt leave a worse donor scar and that you are more comfortable with it and so on. But here are some straight questions :

 

1. Explain how multi-blade does not affect the transection rate. [You mentioned that we could watch over your shoulders and see for ourselves taht it doesnt go over 1-2% but a better option would be a simple explaination from you.]

 

2. To me (and I am not genious!) transplanting 2 halves of a FU will ofcourse not give you 2 hair let alone 1 hair for the obvious reason. So my question is why are we even talking of this? No offense but only for my information, when do you decide you can transplant such cut hair? And isnt this the transected hair we are talking here?

 

3. <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>A final philosophic note is that I think it is unwise to finish the entire transplant process in 1-2 visits.

 

Some of the very successful hair transplantation doctors recommended on this website do recommend getting as many transplants as we can in one procedure to avoid low yield if done in parts. And those doctors have been able to achieve 40-55 grafts /cm2 or even more in some cases. Are you going to be able to achieve even better density than taht if done in more than one sessions? Explain to us what is so unwise about it.

 

Thanks again for your time.

[Dr. Michael Beehner]

PD,

[Dr. Michael Beehner]

Dear PD,

I will try to answer your three questions as best I can.

I was simply saying that I prefer the burden of avoiding transection to be balanced between myself and my staff. By giving them two 5mm wide (still very wide by any past standards of "strips" cut by multi-blade knives) instead of one thick 10mm strip, I assume the responsibility of making sure the sides of each of those two strips is cut with minimal transection. I explained a few ways I used to help me do this (tumescence, flattening the scalp, etc.)They then can "sliver" through these 5mm strips and make the grafts we need for that particular case, FU's or combination FU's.

With regard to my comments regarding an FU cut in half (a bottom and a top portion) yielding hair when planted, this rationale has been used by some in the past for using extremely thin strips and getting all the hair to grow. I was simply stating, as you also seemed to sense, that this is not a good way to produce hair, and, in my opinion is usually a losing proposition for the patient. That having been said, there are some doctors who get some pretty good results with these techniques.

The last point is regarding the number of sessions. I sympathize with the fact that every patient would like to get a full transplant in one session and have it over and done with. So would have I when I sent for hair replacement surgery 23 years ago. But the fact of the matter is that it does take around 9,000-12,000 hairs on the top of the head to give the appearance of a truly "full head of hair." Most of my patients want that kind of density over a large area, usually from the front hairline to the beginning of the rear crown, and I find that three visits is a good way to give them that number of hairs over a large area. If one dense-packs in the numbers you are talking about over the entire area being transplanted, you can only have a relatively small percentage of the scalp done at one time due to the limits of what one donor strip can deliver. I am just uncomfortable taking the width of donor strips that is necesary for 3000-4000 FU's and also have some doubts as to whether the blood supply is adequate for all of those hairs to grow. I'm not saying that some of the patients done in this manner don't look pretty good; I'm simply saying that to date the research has not been done to say what the percentage of hairs that survive is with this type of transplanting. Perhaps in the next few years these answers will be available and we'll all know the best way to do it. Thanks for your questions.

Mike Beehner, M.D.

[PD]

Dr. Beehner,

 

Thank you sir for your answers.. doctors like you posting advices, information, techniques go a long a way in making patients like me to come back to this wonderful website..

[baldbozo]

Personally i dont feel distance or travel should be much of a factor. I recently flew about 20 hours each way from new york to australia and spent 2 weeks there, for an all FUE work with Dr Woods.

 

I wore a gilligans island hat on the way back from australia, and did not have to take it off, but i did get thoroughly searched in syndey on the way back, including taking my shoes off.

 

In L.A The guy in front of me, they asked him to remove his hat. I asked the lady if I could keep my hat on, and they said no problem so long as the buzzer does not go off.

 

I would recommend considering traveling to a clinic, if needed, for you.

 

Whatever you do, will last with you for many years, the rest of your life.

 

So be extra careful, and consider traveling anywhere in usa, canada, europe, australia, or myself, even to the moon if needed to get the best work done for you.