Have a list of questions to ask your hair restoration surgeon

Hair restoration interview Questions for your hair restoration surgeon

Questions to ask your prospective Hair Restoration Surgeon

Can you show me some before and after pictures of patients that you have personally worked on?

The answer should be yes and the surgeon should provide you with several sets of pictures of different patients showing different forms and degrees of hair loss. The pictures will give you an idea of what the surgeon can do and the kind of results to expect. The pictures should be good quality so you can see the details of the work done and so you can see how natural (or unnatural as the case may be) the hair transplant looks. If scarring in the donor area is a worry for you ask to see some pictures of that too. Ideally you should not need to ask this question, the surgeon, particularly if he/she takes a pride in his/her work will volunteer to show the pictures to you whether you ask for them or not.

Can you give me some names and contact details of patients that have received transplants from you?

The answer should be yes, although it may be that past patients are reluctant to go public and talk to you. But still, it is worth asking to meet past patients so you can ask them questions and see how their transplant looks. If you need something different than the standard hair transplant ask to meet patients who had a similar hair loss situation to yours. Again, it may not always be possible, but it is worth asking.

What is the hair transplant technique that you will use? Punch biopsies? Strip grafts? Or follicular unit grafts?

Most good surgeons have progressed to using follicular unit grafts. In this technique, the typical approach is to cut a strip of skin from the donor area and microdissect it under a stereomicroscope to cut the strip into little “units” of one two three and four hair follicles per unit. The small one and two follicle units are grafted at the front to make the hair line. Larger three and four hair follicle unit grafts are used further back to fill in. Units with more than five hair follicles in them can look unnatural – especially if they are used near the front close to or in the hair line.

How do you remove the donor strip of hair follicles?

The answer can vary depending on the particular technique, but most surgeons use a two or three bladed scalpel with the blades parallel to each other at a fixed distance apart. The surgeon then inserts the scalpel blades together into the skin in the donor area and cuts a strip of skin. Because the blades are a fixed distance apart the size of the strip is fixed and the hole that is left has even edges a fixed distance apart. This makes it easier to suture the edges of the donor area together and minimizes the scar tissue formation. If the surgeon just uses a single bladed scalpel then the strip that is cut from the donor area may be uneven and the edges of the hole in the donor area may be a different distance apart at different points. This can make suturing the edges together harder and the result may be a larger, or an uneven, scar than normal. The multibladed knife also enables the donor strip to be taken more quickly than with a single bladed knife.

What form of dissection do you use to isolate the hair follicles ready for implantation. Do you use the follicular unit transplantation (FUT) technique?

The current state of the art (as of 2005) in hair transplantation is a technique called follicular unit transplantation. In this method, the donor strip of skin is microdissected by a team of skilled technicians into natural follicular units. If you look very closely at your scalp skin you will see that hair fibers sprout fro mthe skin in clusters of one, two, three or four. These are natural follicular units. By isolating the natural follicular units under a stereomicrodissecting microscope and implanting these natrual units into bald scalp a very natural looking result can be acheived - because the hair follicles remain in their natural clusters. Unfortunately this method of transplantation is still not used in many clinics because it requires a large (and therefore expensive), skilled team to process the skin and implant these numberous small follicular units.