Another Young Man Who Had Almost 3000 Grafts Fail to Grow
I keep seeing more and more patients that come in to meet with me after the hair transplants they got elsewhere failed to grow. This seems to be the case in large session grafting, usually above 2000 grafts.
Last week I met with another young man who had 3000 grafts transplanted at a clinic with a doctor that I was not familiar with. Shockingly, he had a failure of graft growth to about 95% of what was put in. He is left with a scar behind his head and a significant depression from the failure. He refuses to remove his hat in public and he took much of the blame for the transplant failure. He told me that he thought he did his research, but it sounds like he was sold a bill of goods by the doctor about his reputation.
So many of these men blame themselves for the failure, not the doctor who deceived them. It was not a good meeting for me, and try as much as I could to deal with his depression with an optimistic view of his future, there was nothing I could say to lift his spirits. I am not sure why he came to me, as he did not want to do more transplants. I guess maybe he just wanted to get some sort of explanation of why his grafts didn’t grow.
It is really sad that there are still hair transplant failures in these times. I know that rarely physiology plays a role, but most of the time it is mishandled grafts that cause failure. What bugs me the most is that 3000 grafts could be a third or half of the total donor hair available, which is now lost for good.