Staying on Medication After Hair Transplant

“During the hair transplant process units of one, two or three hairs are moved from a donor site at the back of the head to the areas where hair growth is needed. Once transplanted, the follicles are no longer susceptible to hair loss and will naturally continue to grow. So no matter what age you reach, you’ll be reaching it with a full head of great-looking real hair.”

– This is the quote from Hair Club for Men about their microscopic hair transplant…I thought that after a transplant you still need to stay on drugs to keep your hair..but here it says they’re no longer susceptible. Or does it depend on the kind of transplant?

In my opinion, what you quoted is subtly misleading. Although you do get real hair with hair transplantation, you never get the full head of hair that you once had. There is no doubt that hair transplantation works and it can make a bald man look much better, much fuller if he is thinning, but the limitation is that hair transplantation involves moving hairs around and redistributing it from back to front. It does not create any new hair.

The hair that is transplanted will stay for good, except for the rare occasion where there is disease in the follicle (in which case, a hair transplant should not have been performed in the first place). I generally recommend medication (finasteride 1mg) to most of my male patients before and continued after transplantation, so that they do not lose more of their existing (non-transplanted, genetically susceptible to balding) hair.