The Importance of Proper Hair Transplant Post-Operative Care

The following hair loss article was written by Coalition hair transplant surgeon Dr. William Lindsey:

For years now I’ve seen a few hair transplant patients a year who really did no cleaning at all after their hair restoration surgery. Now, we go through pretty detailed post-op cleaning instructions with patients and we offer every patient the opportunity to come in the next day…even on weekends…to be cleaned up…and we also offer to see patients a couple of times during the first 7 days to make sure they are cleaning correctly.

We also have about 1 case a year that really doesn’t grow well, but 2 or 3 where there ends up being a few “thin spots”.

Now on occasion, those thin spots or diffuse poor growing are in guys who followed every instruction and still had trouble. I saw one of these guys last week and have no idea why he didn’t turn out perfectly. But, fairly frequently, it seems to me that it’s in areas of extremely poor cleaning and crust buildup that this occurs.

I’ve had a theory that the attachment strength of the follicular unit grafts into the recipient scalp eventually is surpassed by the lateral contraction force/stress of really thick crust and then the hair is avulsed (forcibly detached) from the recipient slit.

The patient below is a great example of this. He’s a highly educated professional who was too timid to follow the specific cleaning instructions for fear of pulling out hair even though I tell them they need to clean. I see this in lawyers, politicians, regular guys and the worst offenders of all…physicians.

Note this pic where he had really thick crusts and it looks clear that he has missing grafts on day 7. He grew in great. His thread is posted here: Dr. Lindsey 1 year out from 3000 up front on former hairpiece wearer

But at his second case we had to address these few thin areas with more grafts in exactly the crusty/auto-extracted regions shown here.

I have a couple of other patients with this sequence, and while it doesn’t “prove” my theory, it simply makes sense that you have to limit crusts by good post-op cleaning.

Dr. William Lindsey – McLean, VA

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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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