FUE Yield

Happy New Year Dr. Rassman, thanks for your great work on this site and in real life. Baldingblog is not only informative, but it’s usually fun to read too.

My question is about your reference (in a previous blog answer) to the conference about FUE this past year. Who was the one doctor who you said showed good FUE yield?

Thanks for your kind words. To be honest, I am not comfortable with identifying doctors that are better (by rumor) than others, unless I personally observe them myself over a few difficult cases. It can be easy to get close to 100% yield from an FUE in a “FOX positive” patient, but as I do not know the classification of the patients presented at the conference, I can not rate any doctor based on their yield unless they were classified on the FOX system that we defined. If I recommended one doctor who has 100% yield on a FOX 1 class patient and then if you went to him and were a FOX 5 class patient with a poor yield, then I would have done a disservice to you (see Follicular Unit Extraction: Minimally Invasive Surgery for Hair Transplantation for full details about the FOX test). Your best bet is to challenge the doctor by asking for his yield. If he does not want to address this or did not understand your question, then you should get out of there. I always classify my patients before doing the surgery.