Hair Transplant Surgery by a Non-Licensed Physician

I just saw a person that had a hair transplant by a man claiming to be a doctor (who actually wasn’t). This fake doc opened up a practice for doing hair transplants, and I decided to write a brief note here to hopefully serve as an important reminder about verifying your doctor’s credentials.

So what does one do to verify if the person who claims to be a doctor is really a doctor? It may sound ridiculous, but you could ask to see his/her state identification (like a driver’s license, for example) to get the correct spelling of the first/last name and then look the physician up at the state medical board database. For California, check here — for other states in the US, I found this Medical Board Directory, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for in there, I’m sure a Google search will turn up results by state/country/region. Try using the keywords “medical board” followed by your state/country/etc. Granted, fake state identification might be relatively easy to get, so maybe then you need to get his/her licenses to practice medicine and their narcotic number, both of which are harder to falsify.

The particular phony doctor that prompted this blog entry had rented another doctor’s office to give himself some credibility and had a line-up of patients for surgery. I won’t get into how wrong it was for the doctor to have rented him the office, but what was particularly significant to me is knowing what would have happened if something went wrong with a surgery. One of the most common complications I see is a fainting spell brought on when the Vagus nerve is stimulated from the excitement of the procedure, slowing the heart down to possible unsafe levels. When the heart slows, there is often a temporary drop in blood pressure, but if this very simple process is not addressed quickly and the patient had atherosclerosis of blood vessels to the brain or heart, a simple drop in blood pressure can lead to or cause a stroke or a heart attack. This complication is easily prevented by lying the patient back with the head down and the feet elevated. In a few minutes of careful observation with the patient in this position, the heart rate usually goes back to normal on its own. If this is not done, what may have been simply practicing medicine without a license might turn into some murder prosecution if the patient died.