Yesterday’s Post From Patient Getting FUE in Turkey

I have seen some good results and some terrible results from Turkey. I have been told that there are almost 500 hair transplant clinics and only a few dozen that have actual doctors involved in the surgery which means that the vast majority of these clinics are illegal clinics by Turkish law (not enforced). Mass production surgeries in foreign countries are risky.

1- You can’t hold the doctor/clinic responsible if anything goes wrong. You can’t sue the doctor.

2- There is no follow-up to help you with any problems you might have or questions that might arise after the surgery.

3- If there are deaths from the anesthetics (it happens in some Western Countries where only doctors are allowed to perform the surgery) at the least if there is a doctor present, you have a fighting chance to survive.  With 80% of the clinics in Turkey, I suspect if you had a cardiac emergency there would be no one to make the diagnosis and act to help you. Cardiac emergencies are not totally uncommon in young men.

4- How do you manage complications after the surgery? Most people must see a hair transplant doctor in their home town and ‘beg’ to be seen. Many doctors will not want to deal with you. The scarring seen with these large sessions is fairly common, so the patients have to live with these problems. Few of these clinics warn the patients of scarring complications from large FUE sessions.

5- The testimony that I paraphrased yesterday had a man who was rightfully worried and not happy with the doctor’s service. The doctor told him that if he came back, he would be charged $1 million Euros (over $1 million dollars). The reason I believe that happened is because this man asked too many questions and the doctor did not like that.  For me, the patient interactions is what it is all about and I care for patients because that is why I became a doctor in the first place. One  of the complaints was that the patient did not get what he paid for or what the doctor promised.  I am not surprised as what he got was reasonably pushing the envelope.