How to choose a hair transplant clinic? Guide by Dr. Khaled Alaaeldin, CEO and Founder Of PraxisHair
1. Reputable Clinics vs Hair Mills.
FUE Hair Transplant is done through four steps. Starting with the planning phase and drawing the hair line, followed by extraction of follicles from the donor area, recipient site preparation and creating slits for the grafts and finally the implantation phase where grafts are placed in their final place. The most critical steps in the procedure are the first 3 ones. Your surgeon should be the one doing the first 3 steps completely. The fourth step is usually left to the team involved which preferably are nurses or medical staff.
If your surgeon is not the one doing the first 3 steps, you should step away. Hair transplant is a surgery like any other surgery and it’s better be left to surgeons.
2. Hygiene and Tools
Most hair clinics will argue that they have better tools or equipments or use better hygiene. There is a standard basic hygiene that’s required in all surgeries and patients can easily notice it on entry to the clinic. In terms of tools, most are used as a marketing point, however studies after studies point out that the quality and hand skills of the surgeon are the main decisive part for the success of hair transplant and patient satisfaction.
3. Density
Okay hair clinics can transplant 30-40 hairs per square cm of recipient area. In PraxisHair, our experienced surgeons can reach up to 60 hairs per cm especially in the hair line. This allows us to provide our patients with a dense looking hair line. Placing those up to 60 grafts in a cm is a challenging process. It requires experiences so that they are placed semi-symmetrically to provide appropriate level of blood supply for those grafts to survive.
4. Punch Size and Donor Area Scarring
Over-harvesting the donor area always leads to bad scars and spacing. For simplification, think of a scar that’s 1 mm in diameter. Now add 4000 of those up. That’s 4000 square millimetre of scars equivalent to 40 square CM of scar. That’s a massive scar in the back of your head. Now let’s multiply by 2 in case of Norwood 6 or 7. That’ll leave you with 80 square cm scar. Now there are certain ways to overcome this starting with using a smaller punch of 0.6-0.7 or even 0.55 in some cases and maintaining a good distribution of harvesting so that no area appears empty. PraxisHair is well known by its patients for the excellent donor site.
5. Number of surviving Grafts
Each surgeon is measured by his ability to maintain the highest percentage of surviving grafts. At PraxisHair, our audits show that we achieve >92% of graft survival in all cases and >97% in at least 50% of our cases. This is due to proper handling of the grafts, excellent extraction techniques and enriching the recipient site with platelet rich plasma before implantation to provide proper blood supply and nutrition.
However, smoking or exposure to sun or dust can significantly reduce graft survival by up to 20-30% so we advise our patients to stick to our post operative instructions for optimum results
6. Summary
What makes a satisfactory hair transplant surgery is proper planning, natural hairline, proper handling of grafts, proper extraction technique, maintaining highest percentage of graft survival, proper planning of recipient site, and proper directions of growing hairs with good density while maintaining a decent looking non empty donor area, smaller scar area and smaller punch sizes without sacrificing graft integrity. Discuss those with your surgeon before choosing where to do your surgery.