Dr Rassman, Did You Ever Do Hair Plugs?

In the early days did you ever perform a surgery like this? (hair plugs)

No, I never did the large grafts placed into holes (commonly called hair plugs). I started with my own practice in late 1992 and immediately went to large quantities of small grafts (at the time 1.5mm grafts into punch holes with each graft containing about 3-5 hairs each). I quickly reduced the size of the grafts to 1.25mm grafts, reducing the number of hairs per graft to about 2-4 hairs each and I used all of the single hair grafts in the front of the hairline.

At that time, the follicular unit was not recognized as the “golden standard” that is, until we published the classic article on follicular unit transplantation in the mid-90s (read it here). By 1994, we were using small grafts into slits and many of these grafts were follicular units. Our number of grafts had climbed to as high as 4000 grafts in a single session.