Shaving the Recipient Area to Prevent Shock Loss?
Hi Doc,
I have read places that shaving the recipient area before surgery prevents shock loss and has a higher graft success rate. Do you know if this is true or do doctors who require you to shave your head just want to make the surgery time shorter? Thanks!
It’s probably not true… and you probably learned it from a clinic where the doctor insists on shaving the head. At NHI, we only shave the area that we remove in the donor. The best way to prevent shock loss is to take finasteride before the hair transplant and stay on it for at least one year (better, lifetime). For an experienced doctor and staff, shaving the head is more of the doctor’s preference and doesn’t have much to do with growth / success rate.
Not shaving the recipient area was one of the reasons why I choose NHI to have my procedure. (And I choose Dr. Pak since he was much cheaper than Dr. Rassman, yes highly recommended by him!!! haha)
I think these days, a lot more men, myself included, are looking to fix their eventual balding way before most people notice the thinning areas too much, and the purpose of surgery is to reinforce that area and perhaps drop down the corners a bit. Shaving this front area or crown area would be silly and cause a huge negative impact because it would be going backwards for quite a few months.
Of course the men who are putting hair in areas where hair hasn’t grown for years might not see a problem with a shave to the recipient area, but after researching numerous doctors, I was happy to see that there are some clinics that leave you looking fairly decent just days after surgery without having to wait months for not only the transplanted hair to grow in, but also the native hair as well to help cover it all up.
I look at the daily updates of all the men posting their pics on the hairtransplantnetwork and am amazed how many men are walking around for months with obvious signs of surgery that really didn’t need to have a hole shaved in the top of their head!