If Technitians Are Doing Hair Transplant Surgery, Wouldn’t The Transection Be High?

Maybe I”m off but if technicians are doing most of the procedure I would think the rate of transection would be high. I don’t know what kind of training they’ve had. I assume just in house training. Obviously they’re needed considering the number of grafts but it’s a concern of mine.

In the United States and most of the world, only licensed physicians can perform hair transplant surgery. Doctors make incisions, harvest the grafts, harvest any FUE grafts, and they also make the hundreds or thousands of individual incision of where the hair follicles need to go. The technicians sort the grafts and individually insert the grafts into the pre-made incision sites that the doctors created. For strip surgery, the technicians also dissect the harvested grafts under the microscope into individual follicles. The technicians are trained to perform this highly specific task and the doctors oversee the process. For FUE, a doctor must be the person performing this step, but many doctors just can’s do this very well, so they use someone on their staff (not a doctor) to do the FUE extractions. This is frankly illegal, but as the State Medical Boards are not in the operating rooms, the doctors get away with it. On the other hand, some doctors who purchase an Artas® Robot, can use technicians to operate this machine. That seems to be accepted as legal, although the medical boards in most states have not ruled on this.

At our office, we do the FUE manually with instruments of out own design. Although we ‘invented’ the optical technology for the Artas® Robot, at $260,000 plus $1/graft, that would drive the prices too high for our patients, so we have continued to advance our manual technology which is faster and more efficient (in our hands) than any Artas® robotic surgery. We feel that the Artas® Robot and our manual technique are comparable in quality, but our manual technique is much faster and more efficient in our hands than what we have heard about the Artas® Robot.

Aside from the individual task of each team member, hair transplant surgery is a team effort. It takes a highly coordinated team to execute a successful surgery. That is why the reputation of the medical group or clinic is just as important than just the name of the doctor.