Is FUE² Just a Gimmick?

Can you explain the technical differences between FUE and your new FUE2 “breakthrough.” It’s not clear from your website or you lengthy explanatory page how exactly you are harvesting the hair differently from regular FUE, except that you say the results are “better.” Frankly, it comes across as the same kind of marketing gimmick we so often see on the Internet and that you typically deride. I think you audience would love to understand the procedure better.

If you look at the grafts that are shown (see photos), the quality of the grafts extracted with this new technique speak volumes to what our new method can do. The new technology is presently being covered by a U.S. Patent application, which I believe will eventually allow me to keep the technology restricted to ethical surgeons.

If you look at my history, you will find out that all of the great breakthroughs we have done, including follicular unit extraction (FUE) itself, were published with appropriate videos, photographs, and a full explanation of the process in peer reviewed journals. I won’t go so far as to call it a mistake, but showing my hand when it came to the initial FUE technique opened the doors to any and every doctor offering this surgery, and many were doing it wrong. I trained a great deal of physicians, but I can’t train everyone. Patients were getting sub-par results from untrained doctors, and I want to limit that this time to protect patients. My history speaks for itself and I have never marketed anything that did not work. This tiger (me) does not change his stripes.

What I have learned so far is that the new FUE² technology does not work 100% of the time, so I am still performing the FOX biopsy to select the approximately 5% of patients where the technology does not seem to work well. This information will be critical when the first set of articles are published on it. Included in that group of patients are those who have massive scarring in either the donor area (Open Donor Technique of old) or scars in the recipient area which I would love to harvest directly from the large plugs (for repairs) with the FUE technique. I have yet to use the technology on body hair, but one patient who is presently out of donor hair wants body hair in the crown, so I expect I will be able to report that at an appropriate time, possibly here on this site.

I appreciate that you recognize that I “typically deride” unethical doctors and marketing gimmicks, and I make no apologies for that. I’ve always been outspoken about it, and here is no different. There is so much marketing hype on FUE graft numbers that your attention should be directed to asking for proof that what those doctors do really works to the degree that they say. The FUE² technology is no gimmick, and I strongly suggest you ask any physician to show you photos of the graft quality they can achieve with currently FUE technique and compare it with what we have shown with FUE². What you’ll undoubtedly find with some of the docs out there, is that they use damaged grafts which may provide poor growth, if any. FUE² eliminates that problem.

—
Update 10/10/08 5:10 PM PST: As I was about to go home, I received an email from a man who has had many FUE procedures, all failing. He read my blog and wanted to know if the failures of his FUE procedures were caused by something wrong with him. This is exactly what I am referring to with the unfortunate situation where doctors are selling a process that they do not necessarily command. Doctors are supposed to “above all, do no harm” and we have sworn to this when we took the Hippocratic Oath.