Graft Estimate vs Location - Coincidence?

[miked]

When shopping for my HT center I submitted identical sets of photographs showing all sides of my head to 9 prospective centers. I also explained that i resided in Florida. 2 of the centers were in Florida, 5 where in other states and 2 were outside the US (Canada and Brazil).

 

The responses varied from saying I would need 2000 grafts to needing 4800+.

 

Now that I look back it occurred to me that the Florida centers quoted me the lowest estimates, the out of state ones clustered in the middle around 2800 to 3200 and both the out of the country clinics quoted over 4500 grafts.

 

Is there a chance that local clinics like to quote lower numbers to lock in the business and then profit from touch ups later?

 

I can see why you may want to maximize a session when leaving the country but shouldn't that really apply wherever you decide to have the procedure and is a function of need vs budget?

 

At this point I had not talked turkey with any of the centers and was simply looking for an evaluation of my needs.

 

Just wondering if others had noticed a trend similar to this.

[miked]

When shopping for my HT center I submitted identical sets of photographs showing all sides of my head to 9 prospective centers. I also explained that i resided in Florida. 2 of the centers were in Florida, 5 where in other states and 2 were outside the US (Canada and Brazil).

 

The responses varied from saying I would need 2000 grafts to needing 4800+.

 

Now that I look back it occurred to me that the Florida centers quoted me the lowest estimates, the out of state ones clustered in the middle around 2800 to 3200 and both the out of the country clinics quoted over 4500 grafts.

 

Is there a chance that local clinics like to quote lower numbers to lock in the business and then profit from touch ups later?

 

I can see why you may want to maximize a session when leaving the country but shouldn't that really apply wherever you decide to have the procedure and is a function of need vs budget?

 

At this point I had not talked turkey with any of the centers and was simply looking for an evaluation of my needs.

 

Just wondering if others had noticed a trend similar to this.

[CuriousJungleGeorge]

You contacted nine locations; that really is inadequate to draw a sound statistical conclusion. We can make all sorts of extrapolations, of course, but my neutral comment is, "It's very hard to provide an accurate estimate of necessary grafts based only on photographs."