Dear Dr.Rassman, I recently had a hair transplant the beginning of December of 2005′. I only needed a small area above my bangs,(I’m a female with blond, baby fine hair),and was given a mega’ session to my surprise!) It will be three months the start of March. My question is that post-op, I was told to start using minoxidil for 3 to 6 months. I was told that this would help in blood flow to the follicles. Will the transplants grow without minoxidil? I haven’t been using it every day like I should. Shouldn’t a transplant grow without using minoxidil? I lost alot of my hair that I already had when they were putting it the grafts. I don’t see any of the original hair coming back very fast…something about the hairs being “shocked”? Were they destroyed when the new hairs were translanted, or will they come back? I have less hair now, than when I went in for the procedure! Not to mention the “ear to ear” donor site, that is slowly coming back! Thank You.
Minoxidil may help improve the rate of hair regrowth, however, transplanted hair does not need minoxidil for growth. It sounds to me like you may have some shock loss from the surgical procedure. More than likely, the shock hair loss will reverse (it usually does in women) and your hair would then grow back somewhere between 3-5 months following the surgery.
I am frankly surprised and dismayed by your comment that the megasession was a surprise. There should be no surprises in this process so I would think that your doctor failed you in this regard as good communication is the key to the entire hair restoration process. Your concerns are real, but I wonder if you lost faith in your doctor by my observation that you came to the internet for advice that should be part of the standard of care that one should expect from their doctor.
For the information of the readers reviewing this blog, hair transplantation in women is usually restricted to a sub-set of balding and thinning problems because female genetic hair loss does not occur in patterns like it does in men. In the fringe area around the sides and back of the head (donor area for the transplant), men usually have healthy hair (99%) while women often do not (20% have a good supply of healthy hair). That means that if a women does not have healthy hair and is transplanted, the unhealthy hair is moved along with the healthy hair (not a good use of a surgical procedure). Women with female genetic hair loss can have 4:1 unhealthy hairs:healthy hair ratios. What that means is that for every good hair transplanted, four unhealthy hairs get moved. This is the reason we do not transplant many women as the value may not be there. I have met some doctors who claim that women make up a sizeable part of their practice and generally I have the view that the value proposition here is totally favoring the unscrupulous doctors that do this and give this industry a bad name. What makes women easy victims for the unscrupulous doctor is the general hopelessness that they feel as they move from doctor to doctor looking for the magic cure for their balding so when a doctor brings the promise of a cure, they will easily spend thousands of dollars to go that route. I do transplants on women, but very few of them as women make up less than 5% of my transplant practice and of those women, half of them are treated for non-genetic balding problems such as complications of facial surgery. The old axiom remains, ‘Let the Buyer Beware’.
Good luck to you.
