Beware of Technician Run Follicular Unit Extraction Hair Transplant Clinics

The following hair restoration article was written by Dr. Steven Gabel of Hillsboro, OR who is an elite member of the Coalition of Independent Hair Restoration Physicians.

I recently had a consultation with a hair transplant patient who said he had 1000 graft follicular unit extraction (FUE) performed by a “specialized” technician (he had only 1 person do the entire case from start to finish in 4 hours) who traveled to his physician’s clinic to perform the case. The physician “approved” the design and was not seen until the end when he asked if everything went well. The patient’s result: no growth after 18 months. He honestly cannot decipher if he had a single graft that actually grew.

There are many reasons why this type of hair restoration practice is highly unethical: as mentioned, many states do have laws which limit an “incision” to a physician. In my opinion, an incision can be either a linear incision or a punch incision – each is scoring the skin and the blade (straight or round) is going deep to the epidermis. Secondly, the results from many of these clinics are horrible: no hair growth, and the hairline design is poorly planned and unnatural. And last, the donor hair is a priceless area on the scalp – once the donor hair is exhausted, at this stage in technology, we don’t have any more sources of hair so each follicle needs to be utilized in the best way possible.

These clinics are wasting the donor hair so future hair transplants are limited.

Dr. Steven Gabel
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David
Editorial Assistant and Forum Co-Moderator for the Hair Transplant Network, the Coalition Hair Loss Learning Center, and the Hair Loss Q & A Blog.

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