i shave my widows peak every other day i really do not like it. what will happen to me in the future and is it fine if i keep shaving it everyday? what should i do help. also if i try growing it back it looks very ugly what should i do?

If you don’t like your widows peak, I suppose you can shave it (as you are doing now). In the long term, you will have to continue to shave it since shaving is not permanent. I have seen some patients laser off the widows peak. I have also seen someone who lasered off the widows peak and regretting their decision later on in life. That person came to see me for a hair transplant to get their widows peak back. My wife had a widow’s peak and she hated it and she was thinning in the corners. We transplanted her corners and lowered the hairline enough to incorporate the widow’s peak. She is now very happy with a lower, more rounded hairline as she had when she was younger. No more widow’s peak.

The widow’s peak is never present in very young children. As aging starts, at any age above 5 or 6, if the hairline rises, it may leave behind a midline, pointed tuft of hair which is what we call the widow’s peak. The point on the widow’s peak is always located at the highest wrinkle of the furrowed brow. So the presence of a widow’s peak (a poor term) reflect the point where the hairline was, and the area around it reflects a faded youthful hairline. 83% of women over the age of 40, have a widow’s peak which means that their overall hairline has moved upward, enlarging their forehead, something that most women dislike. When I tried to find famous women who kept their juvnile hairline, it was not east considering that 83% have hairline loss; however, Catherine Zeta Jones was more the exception, see here: I believe that this hairline is exactly where it was when she was 8 years old.

Another beautiful actress who shows her widow’s peak along with the evident recession of the hairline on the sides of the widow’s peak, leaving the widow’s peak as the last remnant of where the midline hairline was. The hair is combed over the right side only showing the left.

Hi there. I have always had a low density of hair around the top part of my scalp since my early teens however I have recently become much more conscious about it. For example after a shower my scalp is quite visible on the top part of my scalp and also when i part my hair when it is dry i can see through it under bright light. I have not undergone any considerable amounts hairloss nor have undergone any noticeable thinning of my hair but simply just feel that my scalp is quite visible on all parts of my top scalp. At a closer look its quite easy to see that my individual hairs are quite equally spaced out and is the main reason why i can see my scalp under the light. I am wondering whether this could just be my natural hair density that i have inherited from my mum (who also has a similar issue) or an early sign of male pattern baldness from my father’s side. Your reply and advice would be much appreciated. Thank you very much :)

If your hair is wet it will obviously look thinner as your hairs are separated from each other to expose the scalp. When you’re under a bright light it also will look thinner as the light illuminates your scalp between the hairs. This should be common sense.

If you are wondering if you are going bald you will likely see a pattern of thinning (see: https://newhair.com/resources/assessing-hair-loss/).

If you are still not certain you can see a a doctor for an exam and bulk measurement. We offer this in our practice in a free consultation with specialized instruments that measure, with good accuracy, your present hair loss status. We can often use this information to predict your future direction of hair loss.

The New Hair Institute has added the Artas® Hair Restoration Robot to its practice offerings (pictured above). Now, in addition to the strip surgeries for traditional Follicular Unit Transplantation, our Follicular Unit Extraction Surgeries (FUE) will include: (1) The Artas® Hair Restoration Robot, (2) the Manual FUE performed by Dr. Pak (we joke by calling him the Pak Robot using techniques we have used for the past 19 years), and (3) the Long Hair FUE, done with our own specialized manual instruments (we have generally limited LH-FUE to about 1000 grafts).

A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY: In 1998, Dr. Pak (who was working with me as an engineer at the time) and I invented the concept of a robot which would use a special optical sighting system to align the hairs exiting the scalp for an automated and efficient Follicular Unit Extraction System. At the time we came up with this technology, we were using Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) for about 2 years. We submitted the patents for two appropriate technologies, one would address the siting system U.S. Patent # 6,572,625, and the second would facilitate stabilization of the scalp with a tension apparatus Patent #US20040049206 (both of these are now used in Restoration Robotics’ Artas® System). We also submitted patents for some future steps in automation which include graft implantation techniques (US#5817120 which has cartridge storage for holding a large number of grafts and used in a graft placement apparatus), though these have not made it into the market today. Although Restoration Robotics’ Artas® robot only performs FUE today, the company will eventually incorporate the full hair transplantation process into the robot. The additional steps needed will: (a) move the grafts from the scalp into a storage mechanism while out of the body and (b) provide graft placement which will most likely use our patented technology. This makes the Artas®, a very appealing technology for our practice both now and in the future. Below are figures taken from the two patents incorporated into the Artas® Robot today.

We are problem solvers and we recognized that although we performed the FUE well, after pioneering it in the mid-1990s and writing the first scientific FUE article in 2002, doctors in the hair transplant field initially failed to perform the FUE procedure with consistency, efficiency and with minimal transection damage to the grafts, so results were generally poor despite proclamations by many doctors to the contrary. The market demand for FUE started to rise and more and more doctors wanted to offer the technique, but failures plagued the field. What was needed was the robotic technology we envisioned (like the Artas®) but that would be a very expensive engineering project, so most doctors tried to master the manual techniques with a wide variety of instruments developed, at times, by the doctors themselves. Some instruments were good (Dr. Jim Harris produced the Safe System) and many were terrible. The patients became victims of the failures which were all too common. Many of these patients found their way to our office. In 2006, Restoration Robotics was formed with a mission to build a robot for hair transplantation. Finally, in 2011 (just 9 years after we published our breakthrough article on FUE and five years after the engineering project was started), Restoration Robotics introduced the Artas® robot which fully addressed the frequent failures seen with the manual FUE process.

Why were we so late in incorporating the Artas® technology into our practice? A very reasonable question which I was ask last week by one of my patients since the Artas® has been available now for 4 years and has about 120 installations world-wide. The five primary considerations for our purchase decision were: (1) We are very efficient at doing FUE (without the robot) as we have been doing the FUE surgery longer than any medical group in the world (since the mid-1990s) with a focus on perfecting the procedure and developing instrument iterations which we pioneered along the way (16 issued patent to-date), (2) We are faster than the robot in doing FUE and faster than most doctors world-wide because we have been doing FUE, in some form, for 19 years, so we hesitated to make the purchase decision. Performing manual FUE efficiently is very difficult and only a small handful of doctors can match our overall speed, quality, and efficiency with manual instruments, so we hesitated to make the purchase decision, (3) The Robot delivers unquestionable quality and consistency, so having one was always appealing to us and the future expansion of the robot’s capabilities, such as in placing grafts, finally made the decision to purchase an Artas® a good business decision for our future practice. We are looking forward to the continued technical expansion of the Artas®’s functionality into this realm, (4) It solved two of our ongoing problems, (a) by eliminating the eye strain and the physical fatigue for the surgeon when performing the repetitive motions for FUE. Eye fatigue, a real known problem previously identified by me in lectures and publications, is worse for any surgeon approaching the age of 50 as their ability to focus and coordinate eye movement becomes a problem of aging in almost all people (fortunately for NHI, Dr. Pak is 42 years old and has none of these changes yet) and (b) repetitive hand motions stress the surgeon’s hand and wrist and can produce health problems like carpel-tunnel syndrome. Dr. Pak who does all of our Manual FUE procedures, tells me that on some days, he feels wrist pain, and (5) There were some initial concerns that there may be a legal problem in using a robot for hair transplantation. The Medical Boards of the Various States, like California, had not ruled on the legality of a robot performing this type of hair transplant surgery. I wanted an approval from the medical board so that if we purchased an Artas® system for Robot Hair Transplantation, they would not ‘ding us’ with regard to our license for improper conduct or rule against the legality of the robot for this purpose. Although the State of California still has not made such a ruling, its silence on this, we believe, has become a quasi-approval on the legality of using a robot for hair transplantation, so Dr. Pak and I concluded that it is worth taking this business purchase risk. The Artas® is not legally different from other robotic surgeries in medicine such as the da Vinci® Robotic Surgical System for Prostate Cancer Surgery and other similar robots which are routinely used in surgical procedures elsewhere in the body.

ARE THERE OTHER HAIR TRANSPLANT ROBOTS? Other hair transplant instrument companies have, unfortunately, falsely implied that their system is a robot, when in-fact it is not. Robots like the Artas®, uses real robotic technology that controls quality and obviates the errors associated with human operation when performing FUE (just like the robots used in the automotive industry to improve automotive quality manufacturing). The goal of a robot is to maintain human judgments while minimizing humans from performing the tedious components of the surgery and maximizing the robotic technology to obtain predictable quality products or services.

By calling an instrument a robot, however, some companies imply that their systems uses robotics so that they can sell them more easily to naive doctors who may think that they are buying a robot. Such doctors follow their purchase with ‘rent-a-tech‘ services to help them offer hair transplant to their patients, even if he/she was never trained in hair transplantation. Many patients asked me during a consultation about one such company, Neograft, (which heavily markets their technology). These patients ask: “is this a robot?” I have had a Neograft system in our office on two occasions (to try it out) and used it so I believe that we are qualified to answer this question. I also watched the Neograft in action in a hotel ballroom in San Francisco where a patient was transplanted in the hands of a technician (not a doctor) performing the service. It worked well both in my office and in the ballroom. The technician seemed to know what he was doing. What I saw, however, was an instrument that looked like a dental drill with a hollow drill-bit used to core grafts from the back of the head and suck them out into a liquid filled small jar (nothing robotic about it). The drill-bit was aligned by the eye in the hand of the operator, not by any optical site system, so the limitations of the human eye were imposed on the effectiveness of this instrument. If the operator was good at it, had excellent eyesight and years of experience, like our manual FUE process, the results could be very good. Many doctors using such systems, however, may falsely believe that they are using a robot for marketing purposes and represent it as such. When people have it performed on them, they can’t really tell if it is or isn’t a doctor doing it because the FUE is performed behind their head (they can’t see who the operator is).

All doctors want to improve their finances in this difficult world of ‘insurance driven medicine’. They are vulnerable to a sales pitch ‘that asks those not in the hair transplant business if they would like to add a few thousand dollars to their daily medical practice?’ This is a persuasive sales technique. Neograft’s sales strategy selling to doctors who are not formally trained in the field is so successful with this technique, that Neograft has become the dominant systems sold to doctors worldwide today. That is why you should always probe the doctor’s training and experience before you ‘buy into’ any doctor offering you this type of service as experience and track record are clearly the most important part of the decision-to-buy process.

The image in the market is that robotic FUE is superior to the manual FUE process. This is probably true in most cases when the system is Restoration Robotic’s Artas® system; however, when dental drills are referred to as a ‘robot’ or when a person without formal training performs the FUE manually with non-robotic instruments, one should question just what is being delivered. Both the doctors offering these services and the patients receiving them should fully understand what is happening and that there is no misrepresentation made with regard to the robotic or non-robotic technology being used. The results from any manual system is heavily dependent upon the skill of the person performing the surgery (eye and hand control), just like it has been in our hands over the past 19 years in providing FUE services. Many doctors can use manual systems, of many designs, competently including the Neograft system which is another manual system. The good news is that some of the experienced ‘rent a techs’, probably do a good job, but they are not doctors. Many of the inexperienced doctors employing these ‘rent-a-techs’ to perform a hair transplant surgery, knows little to nothing about hair transplant surgery and leaving the surgery to a technician has many clinical and legal problems associated with it.

AND WHO DOES THE SURGERY? If you buy into a surgeon who facilitates a hair transplant procedure and you think that you are getting an experienced doctor performing the surgery on you, it might be a fraudulent misrepresentation. The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgeons (ISHRS), believes that the practice of using technicians to perform a hair transplant surgery is ‘facilitating the practice of medicine without a license’ (see:https://www.ishrs.org/content/qualifications-scalp-surgery). These ‘rent a techs’ also make the surgical recipient sites, and at times, I have been told that they administer the anesthesia. These are illegal act. One death that I know of (in the hands of a doctor unskilled in the field, not a technician) occurred California probably from an anesthetic overdose of a simple, usually safe and commonly used anesthetic. Not that simple if it kills someone (the doctor lost his license and the patient’s two children lost their father). Criminal charges (i.e. manslaughter or murder) can be brought against any ‘rent a tech’ who administers anesthesia and by mistake, kills someone. In other words, an incision through the skin with any FUE instrument or an incision that makes recipient sites, or a technician administering anesthetics is illegal in most states and countries unless directly performed by a licensed physician. Anything that goes wrong in such surgeries would put the doctor at risk for ‘facilitating the practice of medicine without a license’, and it could cause the doctor to lose his license, be indicted and/or be criminally prosecuted for it and be personally exposed to a malpractice suit without the protection of his malpractice carrier (which does not cover illegal acts facilitated by a doctor).

Quality of anything we do, is what motivates us and sharing it with the medical profession is critical to our philosophies and our Hippocratic Oath which requires us to teach our colleagues any and all advances in medicine that we originate. When I first introduced the FUE to over 500 doctors at an ISHRS meeting in 2002, to teach FUE, I produced over 500 DVDs which I gave out to the doctors in the audience who never heard of FUE prior to that meeting. The DVD was, in effect, a limited tutorial for FUE. Unfortunately, some doctors used it as a marketing tool to instantly proclaim their expertise in FUE, harming far too many patients.

People always ask us: What Motivates Our Inventions?” My standard answer reflects the cliché that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and we personally believe that ‘there is always a better way to do something, always’. All you have to do is to “think out of the box” when confronting any problem. That is why the Artas® was invented, built and commercialized. The company Restoration Robotics created a masterful, technologically sophisticated robot that leveled the playing field for all those who use one. The training time is relatively short for the coring of the grafts, but all of the surrounding technology still remains manual. The Artas® FUE creates a very high standard of care for FUE. Although today’s Artas® does not offer all of the features and functions it will eventually offer, the doctors who use it must be experienced and have an experienced team of skilled technicians who have mastered the quality control systems that lead to great results. Only with a good team behind it, will the Artas® produce great FUE results. We will write more on the Artas®, robotics and the FUE procedure in a future post shortly that will shed more light on the actual surgery that is very pertinent to the decision on how to pick an FUE doctor. Those doctors who own an Artas®, should be in that consideration.

I am down right angry about everyone targeting balding men as the butt of jokes. People do not understand that behind every bald man, is a feeling sensitive man and I wish that people will stop jabbing at us.

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine (January 9, 2006; pages 43-48), there is an excellent article about hair loss titled “The Power of Hair”, by Burkhard Bilger. There is a great quote in the article from an anonymous source that says, “The man who isn’t bald never thinks about baldness. The man who is losing hair never thinks about anything else.” It is full of wonderful stories about balding looking backward in time, and looking forward to genetic cures, cloning, and some of the recent work done on an experimental basis. The article is worth reading, concluding from a patient who had a hair transplant, “Having hair on your head, you feel like you’re still young. You feel like you’re alive. Nobody wants to look old, man. Nobody want to look old.”

i started to take finax(finasteride) 3 and the half year ago.after 6 months it showed wonderful result.but at 1 year mark i again started to shed hairs.my doctor prescribed me dutas(dutasteride)after switching to dutasteride about 2 years ago my hair loss progression got slowdow(just within 5 months).then 8 months ago i again switched to finastride and now i am experiencing massive hair loss.shedding all of the time with vertex and frontal region getting worse.now ,my doctor again prescribed me dutasteride as well as finasteride both(1
pill of each daily ) in conjunction with minoxidil 5%. i want to know would it work or is he just trying different things on me hopelessly??????

We’ve said this many times here on BaldingBlog. There is no cure for genetic male pattern balding -MPB (androgenic alopecia – AGA). Drugs such as Propecia and Rogain helps slow the hair loss down. For some it even reverses hair loss and slows down the hair loss dramatically. Overall everyone slowly loses their hair as it is pre-programmed in to their genetic make up. Finasteride and Dutasteride work in similar fashion by blocking the DHT hormone but it is not a complete solution. Some think Dutasteride may work better but it is not approved by the FDA and the negative side effects are usually higher than Propecia. The answer to the MPB does not reside solely on Propecia, Dutasteride, or Rogaine. You need to find a good doctor who can give you options and a better explanation on the Master Plan of how to go about addressing your MPB.

A retrospective study examining data show an increased number of visit to the emergency room (from the US Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project). These visits to the Emergency Room grew 50.4% between 2007 and 2012 in Colorado, one of the first two states to legalize both medical and recreational use of marijuana. Also increasing were visits related to opioids (by 42%), hallucinogens (40.4%), sedatives (40%), and amphetamines (20.6%).