Why Is My Hair Transplant Doctor Waiting to Transplant Hair in the Crown?
This question was posed by a hair loss sufferer on our hair restoration forum and answered by Dr. Michael Beehner of Saratoga Springs, NY who is one of our recommended hair restoration physicians. His professional answer is below.
This is a common problem for young men, who want to have all of their hair restored. I think your hair transplant doctor was very wise in telling you what he did. You have no idea (nor does anyone else, including the hair transplant doctor) how bald you may become some day. And if you start filling in the crown/vertex as part of the initial plan on a man in his 20’s, and male pattern baldness (MPB) progresses and logarithmically enlarges, as it almost always does, and the project in that area can’t be completed, you will have a huge bald halo around a patch of transplanted hair and will look very abnormal, and there won’t be any donor hair left to fill in the halo.
By the time a man gets into his later 30’s the hair transplant surgeon gets a much better sense of where a patient is going to end up with regards to the eventual expansion of the crown and also the amount of “safe” donor hair that is remaining and then he can make a much more accurate determination as to whether he has a good safe margin of donor hair reserves to do everything that you want.
The unfortunate truth, despite some of the wonderful medicines we have available now, is that male pattern baldness is a progressive condition. Propecia (finasteride) et al only stall the balding process; they don’t arrest it. You only have to look around you at all the 60 and 70 year old men to see where things can end up. Each one of them was 29 once. Picture what there head would look like if a hair restoration surgeon at that time tried to fill in all of the bald area.
It takes courage for a hair surgeon to turn down a request like the one you made. You will thank him some day. The problem is that, if you keep looking around, you will probably find a hair surgeron who WILL fill it in and do your future a disservice. I have seen ten or so men over the years who had exactly that done at some time 10-15 years earlier and their head looked like a dead animal died in the middle of their head. They always asked me to remove all of the hair grafts, no easy task. I hope you accept his advice.
Mike Beehner, M.D.
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Bill
Associate Publisher of the Hair Transplant Network and the Hair Loss Learning Center
View my Hair Loss Weblog
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