Overseas Travel for Hair Transplants (from Reddit)

Traveling overseas can save you money on a hair transplant. I just surveyed many markets to find out what the cost per graft is in various countries from people who knew. Putting Turkey and India aside for a moment, the costs from reputable clinics including Thailand, Korea, much of South America, Mexico and Eastern Europe range from a low of $3 to a high of $5/graft. Two exceptions seem to be Turkey where pricing can be found as low as $0.50/graft and India where similar competitive pricing to Turkey seems available.

In Turkey, hair transplantation has country-wide offerings. There are about 510 clinics in Turkey, of which less than 40 clinics are reported to have physicians. Clinics are required to have doctors, but most seem to avoid this requirement. The government is blind to them because they bring in over $1 billion per year in revenue. The statistics on India are unfortunately not available, but I have spoken to patients who had a hair transplant in India for between $1-1.50/graft.

The issue or recourse is an important issue. If something goes wrong in most of these inexpensive countries, you have no recourse to complain or sue the doctor or clinic. We don’t know how many patients died in Turkey because there is no reporting mechanism and to report it is bad for their local economy. We do hear about complications from Turkey reported by doctors in Europe who see these patients after they develop gangrene of their wounds, or balding in their donor area.

I know of two deaths in the US over the past 8 years, and that is easy to find. Patients have recourse against the doctors in clinics in the US. As a result, there is an effort to do everything right by doctors in the US because they are at risk if they don’t do it right. Good doctors don’t need to be threatened to do it right.

I have been particularly interested in this subject and expect that I will learn more over time. I wonder if readers on this site would travel overseas to save significant amounts of money if the quality of the work was known to be good. Please write me if you are interested at wrassman@newhair.com, subject ‘Overseas travel for surgery‘

Overseas hair transplant options? from tressless