Female Hair Loss and Realistic Hair Replacement Expectations

This insightful  hair loss article  was written  by  Dr. William Lindsey  of Reston, VA who is one of our recommended hair restoration physicians.

I just finished seeing a delightful 62 year old woman who has hairloss. She has some other medical issues that may be contributing to her problem and may be correctable, but she and I had a nice discussion about my philosphy on female hair loss and hair replacement surgery.

We discussed that my hair restoration practice is 98% male patients and that in general, if I take a man and frame his face with a nice tightly packed hair transplant procedure, or correct a vertex bald patch, I can usually make him extremely happy. Even men with a lot of thinning hair, can often achieve superb results by framing the face with what is left in the donor hair  region.

However, women with even mildly thinning hair often are driven to come in just by the magazines they pass by on the way out of the grocery store. They may expect and demand the thickness of hair displayed on the front of Cosmo or People magazine, and to give them anything less may make them terribly unhappy.

In my experience, I can only be confident that women will be REALLY happy with a hair transplant  if:

• They have a very focused defect, often from an over-zealous facelift removing the temporal sideburn tufts, or from a burn etc.
• They particularly notice their hair loss  along their hair “part”.

For both of these groups, we offer dense packed true follicular unit transplantation (FUT)  and find that these ladies are consistently satisfied – after 1 year.

I see a fair number of women who have had 1000-2000 follicular unit grafts placed in diffuse male pattern baldness by other groups nearby, and these women are not happy. Even if I can explain to them that much of the hair that they currently have is from their hair transplant (done at another doctor’s office) they still are upset that they don’t have the hair they had in their youth.

So for this woman, I asked her to get a thorough medical workup for correctable cause of female hair loss. I told her that I couldn’t help her now (contrary to what she says she heard from a consultant at a practice nearby) but to keep me in mind and if her part became significantly thinner, I would be happy to see her back and discuss options.

I would much rather her be an informed and realistic hair loss patient who felt she got treated fairly, than for me just to take her cash and to give her a less satisfactory result than she deserved.

I guess it worked, as she called her 35 year old son while here and made him an appointment.

William Lindsey, M.D.

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Bill
Associate Publisher

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