A doctor told me that I can’t get an FUE because I have African hair. Why would that be?

African American’s fall into two categories of hair types, somewhat related to where their ancestors came from. Those from East African (Ethiopia for example) have curly hair but not kinky hair while many from the Western part of African have a kinky hair. Kinky hair has the ‘kink’ extending below the skin so that unlike Asians and Caucasian hair which is straight below the skin. some of the African people with very kinky hair, when transplanted, create a challenge for the surgical team. For strip surgeries, when the follicles are dissected under a microscope, it is easy in skilled hands, to navigate the ‘cork screw’ appearance of the heavily kinky hair below the skin as the grafts are prepared under a high powered microscope; however, when FUE is performed, the procedure is somewhat of a blind procedure where the dissection occurs while the hair is in the scalp. As drills are most often the instrument of choice and as always they are very sharp, a ‘cork screw’ hair follicular group may get transected (cut) as attempts to core it out is done with a sharp drill. Some surgeons use special types of punches that do not use a sharp ‘drill’. We use, for example, a serrated punch without rotation as it is hand help. We FEEL the punch as we navigate the coring process. Others use dull rotating punches of different varieties that can often, but not always, manage successful coring without damaging the hair follicles while it is in the scalp. The ARTAS robot uses two punches, a sharp rotating drill for penetrating the skin and a dull rotating punch for the deeper dissection limiting the depth to avoid cutting the ends off of the hairs.