Repost – Fixing Past Hair Transplant Mistakes (with Photos)

We’re taking a week off from posting new content — our first break in almost 6 years — so we’re using this opportunity to repost some older articles that didn’t get the attention they deserved the first time around.

(Originally published on November 20, 2009.)

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This is a patient who I just performed a corrective procedure on. There were many mistakes made here in the past with his other doctors and I wanted to share those problems with you. Knowledge is power, and I hope this will teach you what to look out for so you can prevent them from happening to you. So let’s jump right in…

The Problem

First, let’s take a look at the “Before” photos (click to enlarge):

1. The patient had received around 3000 grafts total in three surgeries on the frontal hairline at another clinic.
2. The hairline is harsh, without single hair grafts in front of the larger grafts. Plus, these were not follicular units, but the old type of minigrafts of 3-5 hairs each.
3. The hairline was placed too low and too straight, creating an abnormal edge which made the transplants obvious to the patient.
4. The surgeon made incisions in the scalp that were not kept in the same place, so the patient had two scars rather than one (see arrows in photo above). The second and third surgeries should have been performed at the same location as the first surgery. The location of the upper scar was too high as well, so transplanting into the upper scar made sense to me.

The Solution

Here are the “After” photos, taken just moments after the completion of his surgery (click to enlarge):

1. I transplanted 1637 grafts total (1391 into the hairline and 246 into the upper scar in the donor area).
2. I built a wide transition zone with only one-hair grafts to break up the leading edge of the hairline so that it would not look transplanted.
3. I had to lower the hairline to get in front of the harsh hairline created by the other doctor. This brought the hairline almost back to its juvenile position, something that I rarely do, but was forced to in this situation.
4. Those 246 grafts transplanted into the upper scar (see arrows in the photo above) should almost completely wipe out its visibility, so he’ll have one scar in the back of his head instead of two.

I find it amazing that this happened recently by a surgeon not far from my office who does a great number of such cases. If this patient had asked to meet some of that doctor’s patients, I am sure that this is the type of work he would’ve seen. People just don’t know or think to ask a doctor to meet with other patients ‘one-on-one’. There is no substitute for meeting patients directly and talking to them about their overall satisfaction. We offer an Open House every month to allow prospective patients the chance to meet up to a dozen of our patients who had surgery. A detectable hair transplant is not what you want and it is easy to see the quality of a doctor’s work by engaging with one-on-one patient interviews.