3000 Grafts - ASMED - Dr. Koray Erdogan

[CosmoKramer]

50 minutes ago, Payam said:

You should read some on what a clinic trial consists of and how heavily they are regulated and monitored by the FDA and institutional review boards, it's pretty much impossible to get skewed data past these entities as you are insinuating. 

I guess you’re not too familiar with the practice of payola and pharmaceutical lobbyists and executives being chosen to run the FDA?

Absolutely it’s possible to get skewed data past the FDA when the foxes run the hen house, in fact there are countless drug lawsuits that have show that the pharmaceutical manufacturers didn’t disclose long-term serious side effects and other pertinent information, hence why they end up paying settlements to victims and fines but always 1/10 of the amount they made off the drug so it’s a drop in the bucket.

You can google how many have gotten in trouble after they’ve racked in billions then just a slap on the wrist and business as usual.

Just yesterday Monsanto was ordered to pay $2 Billion because an elderly couple were struck with cancer because of Monsanto’s  RoundUp weed killer, which it’s cancer-causing ingredient (Glyphosate) was classified as “safe” by the FDA & EPA, even in food. Until now, that it’s been exposed via lawsuits.

You can also Google: US FDA internal emails show weed killer found in food

Edited May 15, 2019 by CosmoKramer

[abysmo]

Result after Month 11, at this point, with this result, can I expect a miracle to happen ? Can anyone explain why this happened ?

[abysmo]

I've been using Finasteride, Dutosteride and Minoxidil by the way. Trying everything that's out there but no significant change thus far. It's been devastating the psychology of this. 

[BjornBorg]

I sincerely feel your pain. That is the worst 11 months result I have seen from Dr Erdogan.

It shall be interesting to hear what the clinic has to say about this and their growth guarantee. Please do let us know!

[Kraistoff]

20 minutes ago, abysmo said:

Result after Month 11, at this point, with this result, can I expect a miracle to happen ? Can anyone explain why this happened ?

Hello mate. I’m no expert but I would say it isn’t going to improve that much. 

 

I would point out that it probably isn’t as bad as you think it is. With another 2000 grafts you will be sound . 

 

[Mr S]

Can sombody please remind me why this clinic is still recommended on here ? 

[FarsanUk]

1 hour ago, Mr S said:

Can sombody please remind me why this clinic is still recommended on here ? 

No balls and vested interests. This is not a 1 off. This is becoming consistent. We dont care what the clinic has to say . Just take them of this forum recommendation and save people

 

[LordBaldwin]

3 hours ago, abysmo said:

Result after Month 11, at this point, with this result, can I expect a miracle to happen ? Can anyone explain why this happened ?

To be honest with you, even as a slow grower, you should still be nearly 90% done at 11 months.  I'm sorry to say you most likely won't get the kind of result you're looking for.

As far as why it happened, it's difficult to say.  It could be physiological (like a lack of blood flow to the scalp), or it could've been a result of something done on the clinic's end.

[LordBaldwin]

2 hours ago, Mr S said:

Can sombody please remind me why this clinic is still recommended on here ? 

In the last year and a half, I've seen 27 patient reviews for ASMED on this forum (only counting ones that were updated enough to give us a reasonable impression of the result).  Out of these 27, about 20 seemed good or great -- in other words, about a 74% "success" rate.  Obviously, it's pretty unfortunate to see 7 unhappy patients over this short a span of time, and 26% unsatisfactory is not exactly a trivial amount.  Though I feel bad for those 7 people, I'm not sure where the line should be drawn as far as success rate is concerned when making a determination for recommendation of a clinic.

[LordBaldwin]

1 minute ago, Phil36fromaus said:

it seems obvious to point out but ... the issue with taking stats from forum threads is that it only takes into account the patients that speak up about their bad results.

It took me 6 months into a bad HT to get to the point where I wanted to post anything about it, and only ended up doing so because that HT doc refused any patient support. It's an argument from silence but i always wonder about the other patients that never speak up at all ...

And i believe this site doesnt conform to a success rate % in order to get recommended, does it?

This is true.  I tried to take this into account, initially, by only including people who had started posting from the beginning of their hair loss journeys, so as to reduce the amount of self selection bias in the sample (I also didn't count clinic-posted results, as these are self selected as well).  However, I ultimately decided that this ends up being a disservice to people like Abysmo, who didn't start posting until months down the line (I do not blame him for this).  Thus, I ultimately counted Abysmo and the others like him, but I'm still not counting clinic-posted results (which are always positive) -- this could actually deflate the success rate a bit.  

In general, I'd expect people who are worried or unhappy to post more often in order to seek support or to vent their anger.  It's easier to imagine a happy patient just forgetting about their whole ordeal and going about their life, but this is just speculation.  

No, this site doesn't conform to a success rate, as far as I know.  I'm not sure how the moderators make their determination.  If I were to suggest a method, my suggestion would be to allow a poll on each result (concerning whether or not the result was successful); the poll could only be completed for a given result at the one year mark (provided that 12 month images were posted).  Then, all polls for a particular clinic within a certain span of time (like the last two years) would be combined to generate an aggregate success rating for the clinic -- basically, a quantified representation of the community's opinion, and there would be a cut-off value for entry into recommended status.

[CosmoKramer]

4 hours ago, abysmo said:

Result after Month 11, at this point, with this result, can I expect a miracle to happen ? Can anyone explain why this happened ?

For 11 months this is very disappointing, I’m sorry about your situation. Have you spoken with your asmed coordinator or Dr Erdogan for an explanation and recourse?

[LordBaldwin]

1 hour ago, LordBaldwin said:

To be honest with you, even as a slow grower, you should still be nearly 90% done at 11 months.  I'm sorry to say you most likely won't get the kind of result you're looking for.

As far as why it happened, it's difficult to say.  It could be physiological (like a lack of blood flow to the scalp), or it could've been a result of something done on the clinic's end.

Actually, I'm going to update this statement a bit.  The biggest X factor in these cases is graft survival (i.e., yield), which is almost impossible to predict in the early stages.  However, since we know approximately where you should be at this point, it's probably pretty safe to say your issue was low yield.  If we look at your picture, it does seem that the hair strands that grew are fairly thick, now....there just don't appear to be many of them.  I have seen rare cases where there was very late growth, but those cases are few and far between, unfortunately.    

[LordBaldwin]

1 hour ago, Phil36fromaus said:

Probably the only people in this industry that truly know which Ht docs and clinics are performing badly are the more established repair docs who get to review all the different patient consultations coming in. 

I like your idea of a yearly democratically-elected approach to this site, given that's the exact amount of time most patient results can be fully assessed and if there was a pattern emerging, like we see from Abysmo's case and others at Asmed, it would be an opportunity to remove them from the site, (or at least put them under review). Otherwise this site's recommendation process seems to be a "once you're in you're in" mentality, which might not motivate the lesser quality clinics to lift their game.

All quite upsetting really.

 

That's probably true.  While it's very easy to tell which clinics are bad (like ones who post almost no patient results and many stock images of models), it's pretty hard to differentiate between the ones that are good and the ones that are great.

Yeah, there should be a recurring "performance review" of each recommended doctor that uses numerical "grading" as a tool to make recommendation determinations.  While only moderators should see the poll feedback for each individual result, the composite score for the surgeon should be visible to everyone for transparency.  It would also be good to define what an acceptable success rate should be (like 75-80% or more?) for acceptance.

[abysmo]

The clinic is very supportive and states that they will take required measures to make me happy. We are still trying medical treatment and an official decision is yet to be made. In terms of interest and kindness Asmed didn't dissapoint me. 

On the other hand, the solution part is yet to be seen. The problem is I wanna know the reason behind this and there is no explanation found thus far. If I am to live this process all over again, I need to know that a failure might not happen this time. And I wonder if there is nothing wrong with the procedure, how come thousands of clinics and forums can state that an hair transplant procedure has nothing to do with luck and a guaranteed result can be achieved ? 

[LordBaldwin]

7 hours ago, abysmo said:

The clinic is very supportive and states that they will take required measures to make me happy. We are still trying medical treatment and an official decision is yet to be made. In terms of interest and kindness Asmed didn't dissapoint me. 

On the other hand, the solution part is yet to be seen. The problem is I wanna know the reason behind this and there is no explanation found thus far. If I am to live this process all over again, I need to know that a failure might not happen this time. And I wonder if there is nothing wrong with the procedure, how come thousands of clinics and forums can state that an hair transplant procedure has nothing to do with luck and a guaranteed result can be achieved ? 

I don't think anyone can honestly guarantee that you'll have a particular result.  If they do, it's a major red flag, because it's impossible to account for every variable (like physiology) even when the doctor is 100% involved in every surgery.  Some clinics (like this one) do offer free corrections/touch-ups if a certain percentage of grafts don't grow.

[LordBaldwin]

18 hours ago, Phil36fromaus said:

As I'm assuming this is based on posted results to the forums, how well a clinic handles a bad result might throw of any measurement. For example a mediocre doc might be great at handling their bad results (probably because he would be used to handling them) as opposed to how a good doc might be terrible at handling the odd mistake, we know who is going to be more vocal and what will get more attention and hit the forums. 

hard to develop a criteria based on some level as well because this industry is about expectations and results are highly subjective. I can look at a guy who gets 90% growth and think its amazing. Same guy could look at it and think "man i have weak spots this sucks". Definitely worth a discussion though if it can prevent the current asmed trend from affecting others. 

Well, subjectivity isn't really an issue.  If we use a numerical ranking system that incorporates everyone's votes, we'll have a more quantifiable, precise way of capturing the consensus opinion.  If the vast majority of people have a positive opinion of something, the odds are high that a randomly selected person also will have a high opinion of it.  It's similar to an Amazon composite review score; obviously, there will still be unhappy people that disagree with the consensus opinion -- that's how it always works, but chances are that a random person would agree with the opinion.  As far as what the cutoff should be for recommendation, perhaps that should be put to a vote as well, or at the discretion of the moderators?

As far as the apparent ASMED trend is concerned, I have mixed thoughts.  On the one hand, it's hard to deny that there was a decrease in success rate in 2017-2018.  Indeed, when I calculated the rate prior to my own procedure, it was still over 80% (it appears to have dropped 6-7% since then).  However, I've also noticed that the majority of the most recent results -- those from the very end of 2018 through 2019 -- are actually looking pretty good.  In other words, the decrease in success rate may have been temporary, though I know this is no consolation to the people who were affected by it.

[LordBaldwin]

8 hours ago, abysmo said:

The clinic is very supportive and states that they will take required measures to make me happy. We are still trying medical treatment and an official decision is yet to be made. In terms of interest and kindness Asmed didn't dissapoint me. 

On the other hand, the solution part is yet to be seen. The problem is I wanna know the reason behind this and there is no explanation found thus far. If I am to live this process all over again, I need to know that a failure might not happen this time. And I wonder if there is nothing wrong with the procedure, how come thousands of clinics and forums can state that an hair transplant procedure has nothing to do with luck and a guaranteed result can be achieved ? 

So there probably is a way to determine the likely cause, but it would require effort on the clinic's end.  Essentially, the clinic would need to do a root cause analysis on their discrepant results, looking for any potential patterns or similarities between the patients who had unsatisfactory outcomes.  For example, were any of them performed by the same tech team (I'm wondering if the clinic does performance evaluations for each tech team)?  If so, how many?  Did most occur during a similar span of time?  Were they using the same lots of ATP spray or other graft survival-promoting chemicals (and were they using the same suppliers)?  Did the patients have similar hair characteristics?  Were they of a similar ethnicity/age?  These are questions the clinic could probably answer if they wanted to, but this would require some research... and, to be honest, I'm not sure they'd see it as cost effective.  I'm not sure how many clinics/medical providers do anything like this.

[abysmo]

I believe it's very cost effective in the long term since the ability to identify a problem regarding a bad result and fix it isolating the root cause is a distinguishing factor choosing the right clinic. Also if you can find the root cause and identify the problem then the intellectual property will be yours until forever and knowing what can go wrong throughly will eventually increase your yield. 

[TempleRunner]

I also did my Ht at ashmed i'm 4 months. try to wear your hair down. the lack of density is less visible that way. If I wear my hair backwards it looks awful, but down it is pretty good.

like one wrote, it seems that not all the graft grew, may be it is something specific to your physiolgy or something the team did. let us know the clinic response to this. 

[TempleRunner]

another thing - you got 3000 grafts on a large area. i had 4200 on half of the area, maybe this is it. ASMED is known for big HTs so i wonder why you got such a low estemation. it is unlike asmed. 

[abysmo]

It's because of me, at first the estimation was 4500 grafts. It was too high for my budget and I have requested a more conservative hairline. Thanks to Dr. Erdoğan he accepted. On the other hand final result cannot be explained by this since the survival rate is much less than transplanted. I assume it's below 1000. So we have to analyze and find the root cause behind this.

[Kraistoff]

On 7/12/2019 at 8:47 PM, abysmo said:

Result after Month 11, at this point, with this result, can I expect a miracle to happen ? Can anyone explain why this happened ?

What kind of lighting is this photo on? 

[Kraistoff]

Update ? 

[therealmvp2016]

my 2 cents:

3000 grafts just wasn't enough for your level of hairloss, it looks like you are a norwoord 4.5... I'm looking at your before photos, and ASMED was right, you needed 4500-5000 grafts to achieve the desired result/density... it has nothing to do with a more "conservative hairline" as you stated... but more the actual density.  70 cm2 overall surface @ 3000 grafts= density of 42 grafts per Cm2.  it looks like your 11 month photos your density is about 30 cm2...  Just curious if you don't mind me asking, why would you go down so low when ASMED said u needed 4500-5000, and u said lets do 3000?  I mean thats a huge difference. Was it a financial issue? eventually you will need to go back and get your extra 1500-2000 grafts again.  Good luck, keep us posted, I hope you get the result that you desired! 

[Vpac]

Shocking result, very bad mismanagement of the hairline from Asmed. You said you requested a higher hairline, but it doesn't look it, that hairline still looks pretty low to me. And if Asmed knew that 3000 grafts wasn't enough over that area, they should brought the hairline up. I had my HT with asmed 4 years ago and I am generally ok with the results (not super happy, not dissatisfied, just ok) and was considering going back for round two but all these poor results makes me think I need to start looking elsewhere. Although their staff are wonderful I don't see why they are doing 8 patients a day, that is just madness. Also I found Dr Koray can be a bit abrasive and pushy when it comes to deciding on the procedure "I know best" - yes sir you may well do, but it's my head! Should listen to the patient more but when you're pumping out 8 patients a day he's probably fed up of seeing the same questions and problems and just wants to force what he wants. If I was you, get a refund and go somewhere where the actual surgeon does the surgery.