Ever tried plucking out bad transplanted hair??

[hotel76]

I had a poor transplant a few years ago, Luckily they only transplanted a few hairs, 100 max I think. up close you can see that they are not that great but thankfully my natural hair always covered them up. However that is now thinning and the transplanted hair can be seen more easily. So I want to get rid of the old transplanted hair.

 

Does anyone know if I can pluck out the transplanted hair?

[gillenator]

You can continue to pluck the hair shafts but as long as the hair follicle itself remains, it will just grow another hair shaft to replace the one that you plucked.

 

Your other options would be to have them removed by excision (cutting them out), extracting them out with FUE, and also electroalisys (non-surgical).

 

Only the last option would not leave you with any visible scarring. FUE with the proper sized punch would leave you with the most minimal amount of visible scarring if any visible at all. I trust most of these 100 grafts were single hair grafts?

 

In addition, with FUE, these grafts that are extracted may potentially be able to be re-located and re-implanted further up the scalp so they are not discarded. It's difficult to say how many would survive but at least they would not be thrown away and possibly you could have more FUE done in the same procedure.

[hotel76]

Great reply, thank you!

 

Good to know some options. I’m having a consultation with Ron Shapiro with a view to FUE into my scar so will discuss this as an option, otherwise will electrolysis them out. I think they are all just singles.

 

thanks

[scar5]

In addition, with FUE, these grafts that are extracted may potentially be able to be re-located and re-implanted further up the scalp...

 

Gil,

 

How far away, in you opinion, can the re-cycled hairs be replanted from a zone impacted by fresh extractions?

[gillenator]

Gil,

 

How far away, in you opinion, can the re-cycled hairs be replanted from a zone impacted by fresh extractions?

 

Ideally they are re-implanted in any area that has good blood supply (vasculation) and low to no trauma from neighboring incisions.

 

Alot of trauma is caused to the grafts themselves when removed and relocated to a new area. And it can be the condtion and the handling of these grafts that have just as much impact on the survivability of them. This is why some docs would rather excise them than extracting them because there are no "torsion, traction, or compression forces that accompany FUE methods.

 

Still, there are several very experienced surgeons utlilizing FUE in repair work and are far more proficient in removing and re-implanting grafts. Providing the new grafts are in good shape, I like FUE because the grafts that are extracted can be potentially re-implanted right away decreasing the time "out of body", and increasing survivability.

 

Some even coat these extracted grafts in solutions that help prevent the free radicals from attaching to the graft tissue. This also helps minimize the effects of ischemia reprofusion, deteriation of the exposed grafts.

[scar5]

Ideally they are re-implanted in any area that has good blood supply.. and low to no trauma from neighboring incisions.

.

 

Sorry Gil, I gotta pin ya down here. What u r saying is....how far? How far away?

Any area? A few mm away? 10mm+?, an inch? 2 inches?

 

When hair is planted, docs can plant very tightly at 25 grafts/cm or more, but when doing the re-cycling business they seem to wanna move the hair miles away.

 

Say your scalp is like the United States, and the trees are messed up in Florida and Oregon. You want them to lie flat. The docs take 'em out and plant them in bloody Nebraska, making Oregon and Florida a desert. It leaves the patient with an unattractive choice, stalky bundles of hairs sticking up like toothbrushes or no hair in the area at all. It has always befuddled me and I wonder was it just because of my particular experience, or is it an industry wide thing?

[aaron1234]

hotel76,

 

My first crappy procedure left me with some 2 and 3 haired grafts in the hairline. Dr. Paul "punched" them out, FUE-style. I'm not sure where they were exactly replanted. But obviously, I had my hairline reconstructed with more grafts during that procedure - more than making up the difference from those which were re-transplanted. This might be a possibility for you as well.

[scar5]

Aaron, that IS interesting. So you are saying your doc planted over or around the extraction holes created by the FUE extraction of the pluggy stuff he took out?

Did you notice gaps around them? I guess not is what you are saying. And that tells me docs don't mind replanting hair around the zone.

 

One of the stated reasons for not replanting near the original extraction points is that the scarring that will result in the holes may unpredictably alter the landscape of the scalp in those areas, making it tricky for the doc to plan the incision angles. The suggestion is that you may end up with the same hair popping up all over again.

 

I believe in this to some extent. Transplanted hair never behaves like virgin hair. It is often splayed due to the micro scarring inside and caused by the incision slit itself, even if the techs are fastidious about planting them at the correct orientation (..and let's face it, how fussy can they be when they gotta do '000s before they go home)

 

On the otherhand, I feel stooged. What is the point in getting hair replanted if it is moved to the other side of the world. (Yes, the world is my scalp)

[Dr. Ricardo Mejia]

It is not likely to be succesful. You would need to do a FUE, Follicular Unit Extraction to get the root of the hair follicules.

[aaron1234]

Aaron, that IS interesting. So you are saying your doc planted over or around the extraction holes created by the FUE extraction of the pluggy stuff he took out?

Did you notice gaps around them? I guess not is what you are saying. And that tells me docs don't mind replanting hair around the zone.

 

Here are a couple pictures from one/two days post-op of my second surgery (first with SMG). You can certainly identify the punch out sights in the hairline. There were about 20-30 of them I believe. They took a little longer to heal but they eventually did and I see no scarring from them. The new hairline was planted relatively close to the FUE punch out spots and I really didn't notice any gaps due to them. I suppose the perfectionist in me would like to address some areas in my hairline now but I don't think that is due to the "punch out" sites.

 

It does remind me that some of the good-ol-day plugs which get removed now require stitches to close the "punch" wound. This was not the case for my mini-grafts.

[scar5]

Aaron, ha..so one of us got stooged, and judging by your photos, it wasn't you.

But to be fair to my doc, other docs have told me similar things -they said they don't wanna replant near the extraction zones. It was a real dilemna for me. Another problem is that you can't get them all out at once. So if you go to the trouble of replanting them at the correct angles in that zone, you might destroy them removing other nearby bulky stalks in round two.

 

Yet, anyway your area was planted on and it looks very evenly planted without undue /due? regard for leaving a safe-zone around the extraction holes left by the removed plugs. Go figure...

 

Ah..those were the days...when doctors planted the micros straight up like lamp posts to give density, and your left and right side would be different according to whether the doc was left handed or right handed. Think about what you missed?

[gillenator]

scar5,

 

Let me be a little more specific if possible building on my general points ealier.

 

When I stated that the extracted grafts can be re-implanted elsewhere, we have to remember that every patient in need of repair has their own unique situation. So it cannot be stated ahead of time exactly how far away the extracted grafts can be re-implanted from each other without the surgeon evaluating each individual patient/repair case.

 

Meaning, that until the repair surgeon can evaluate each patient, they cannot really decide where they think the extracted grafts should be re-located. Some patients have more scarring than others. Sure it's possible that some of them could potentially be re-located within the same area however the extracted area is going to be under trauma from the multiple extractions depending how many are removed. And that is why the surgeon may want to move the extracted grafts up behind the hairline within the frontal zone where the blood supply is richer and scarring/trauma is less. It improves the chances of their survivability, and again better than discarding the grafts that are removed because we all have a limited donor supply.

 

If the extraction repair area within the hairline involves extracting many unwanted grafts, the surgeon may want the extracted area to heal first before adding any "significant number" of new grafts. And yes, the area can look more thin post-op because the unwanted grafts were removed, but let us remember that the first phase of this type of repair is removing what is unwanted. Then adding new grafts between the scarring or even where the the healed extraction sites are depending again how much scarring exists post-op, and if those sites appear to have enough blood supply.

 

If the area is not under as much trauma and there appears to be adequate vasculation between the exisitng hair, he may go ahead and plant new grafts to help make up what was extracted. Once the area has healed and recovered from trauma, the patient can have grafts added later which IMHO will increase the chances of a better yield.

 

In addition, the patient and the doctor has the benefit of seeing the matured repaired result and better evaluate which areas on the hairline/frontal zone can have added grafts to touch-up and finalize the repair scenario.

 

So it is impossible to just state exactly how far away these extracted and new grafts can be situated away from one another. There is not one answer for every situation. In fact, there are many cases I have observed where the unwanted grafts/plugs have so much exisiting scarring that the surgeon will not want to go in and start disrupting and removing them. Sometimes they just add new grafts between the unwanted hair to disguise the area rather than start removing grafts.

 

In other words, with some repair cases, the surgeon may feel it would do more harm than good to remove unwanted hair because removing them would just increase the level of scar tissue and subsequently decrease the blood supply which is already restricted and compromised.

 

And it's understandable for the surgeon to want to plant more grafts in the "same session". Yet IMHO, it's sort of a defeated approach to add grafts within the same area when their chances of survival are not ideal for the reasons that I stated above.

 

Sure, we read all of the time of HT surgeons establishing hair densities in the levels that you stated, but typically these are mostly new cases where the upper limit of densities are achieved, not repair cases.

 

Hope this makes more sense to you.