Consultation With DR.Ron Shapiro

[parsia]

Hello . Everyone 

I finally was able to fly to Minnesota and have my consultation with DR.Ron Shapiro , I just thought I should provide an update for those who were following my other thread and also to provide my feedback to other member on the forum , It will be a long post and some data you may already know or not , But what I'm trying to do is ,  to make it clear for everyone who read this post now or in future  : 

The Shapiro medical team staff was very friendly and my consultation was with Matt and he gave me some general and also detail informations about the philosophy of the clinic and their repetition and also estimation of grafts I need for the surgery , Matt also measured the area of my baldness and then I met with DR.Ron Shapiro Since I was flying from California to Minneapolis I was specifically asked before to see DR.Ron in Person , I can only say good things about how he treated me and spent time with me and answering all of my questions , Considering he is an Elite surgeon in US and the World , I was very impressed how Humble he was , We had some great educational conversations and I was feeling very comfortable with him , He is very ethical and really have a good manner and also care about patients needs , at the same time  when it comes to make decision about designing the hairline and also density  he follows his standards and his rules which has been works for many years , Which is very understandable because thats his signature on his high quality work. 

Donor Area : DR.Ron Examined my Donor area and he seemed very happy with my Donor , He estimated I should have 7000-8000 in my donor , Maybe even more ( the average person have about 6000 grafts available )  Also based on His study and Dr.David  If I combine FUE and FUT , I can have at least 2000 more grafts on the top of that ( The study was showing patient can get 1500-3000 grafts more ) , which can make my  total number  near to 10000 and when I mentioned that he confirmed that.

FUT VS FUE : One of the reason I wanted to have consultation with DR.RON was because he is one of the fewest surgeon who do BOTH FUT and FUE , So he doesn't have any emotional attach to either method , Also if a surgeon can do both method then it would make more graft available to transplant , However DR.Ron mentioned if I feel more comfortable with FUE because of not having linear scar and less pain , I can chose FUE for the first surgery , And for 2nd Surgery he will examine my donor and then decide  if I need to do FUT or not. So basically most patients can do FUE first and they can do the FUT down the road in order to maximize the donor area .

Hairline Design : This subject was one of the main subject in our conversation , I had different hairline design in my mind for years which I kind of knew it wouldn't match the DR.RON standard but I wanted to hear his philosophy in person , He professionally explained to me that the design I have in my mind can look unnatural in his eyes and doesn't match his practice over the years , Because what I wanted was more aggressive and could be have some similarities to female hairlines however DR.Shapiro wants patient have some recession which is very normal in every men with no or minimal hairloss , He also mentioned he needs to do temple work on me to build up what I have lost  which made me glad because I know the degree of my hairloss and I was always thinking without temple work I probably wouldn't have natural outcome. I also have to mention that for the previous consultation I had with some other clinics one of them didn't want to do temple work at all  because of the risk of outcome  and the other one accepted that after I requested that to the surgeon , So I do believe here is where you see the difference between very high skill professional surgeon compare to the average clinic , With that being said  some or many surgeon avoid to do temple work since it is not very easy to achieve the desire result. 

Density :Here is one of my other favorite subject which we spent enough time to discuss , I personally did study around 300-400 patients from different doctors ( Including DR.Ron ) and figured the average number of hair each graft is 2.0 ( And yes this information can be  easily access online with a simple google search but I wanted to have that number from different races as they can have different density ) , Dr.Ron mentioned the variation of the average is 1.8 to 2.3 hairs per grafts and 2.1 can be a good number for  average ( Very close to the number I had) Also he mentioned that he always like to be on the safe side and put the other grafts for second sessions , He doesn't feel comfortable to do mega session and for instance if 6600 grafts need to be harvested , doing  4400 grafts in one session and 2000 graft on second one is not what he feel comfortable to do, He feels more comfortable to divide it moderately to two sessions ( Like 3200 each ) , The reason is he likes to see how the first surgery goes and see if the patient is happy with result or not and then adding or filling some area will be much easier than giving  the patient look they are not happy with the overall work , Because the repair of that would be much harder . What I figured is even if Mega session or either aggressive hairline   can make 1  patient  unhappy out of 20 , Dr.Ron wants to avoid that to be happen , Which  just shows how he highly cares about his work and patient satisfactions and of course this way he can manage the donor area for future loss as well and not putting most of eggs in one basket. I have to mention this doesn't mean surgeon shouldn't do Mega Session , These are just preferences  and can varies between surgeons. 

In the end he plans to have 3000-3500 grafts FUE for me in two days and the exact number of harvested grafts  depends on the caliber of my hairs on the day of surgery.

I hope this post be helpful and if there is any question you have ,Feel free to post it here , I will be happy to answer. 

Cheers. 

Edited October 3, 2022 by parsia

[HairRun]

Great write up. I had a similar experience, I asked for a conservative hairline, but then the hairline he drew was even more conservative then that by a little, I was looking at my old facebook photos to see if it matches the one I had in mind but he said we can build it up later which I liked because I rather it be too little and build it up later, than too much. 

My first hairtransplant ended up being lower than the agreed upon hairline, which is not only bad because of the repair work involved and losing due to the transection rate of both implanting and relocating, but the first transplant was very low yield, it may have been like 300-400 out of the 1300 grafts, if I my surgeon had been more conservative, then less grafts would have been lost due to low yield. 

[HairRun]

@parsia totally forgot about this. 

If you want, you can draw the hairline you wanted, vs what Dr Shapiro wanted. 

We did this with someone else and were able to point why the surgeon hairline looked better than the aggressive one they picked 

 

[parsia]

9 minutes ago, HairRun said:

@parsia totally forgot about this. 

If you want, you can draw the hairline you wanted, vs what Dr Shapiro wanted. 

We did this with someone else and were able to point why the surgeon hairline looked better than the aggressive one they picked 

No Problem my friend , Thank you for your offer and also posting this thread , I know DR.Shapiro has his own standard to design the hairline so I decided to go with his recommendation and then after first surgery we will discuss about options . 

 

[parsia]

Update-

I have finally done my surgery with Dr.Shapiro and also DR.Joe about a week ago since I was on waiting list for 11 months  , We have done the FUE for 3500 grafts and totals of 7151 hairs , I was amazed by their team and how professional they were to treat me as a patient  , Overall I was very satisfied with how the surgery went , Even though we did kind of a large surgery  but the staff was very friendly and It went very smoothly , Also my many thanks to my friend Ryan on forum who helped me a lot for my surgery , If you have any question about procedure feel free to ask and I will be happy to answer .

[parsia]

You can also see the thread and result of my surgery on this thread :