Phase 2 Hair Transplant Assistant Training (from Dr. Lam’s book, Hair Transplant 360)

Phase 2 training can be done in a live human patient or more ideally with cadaver tissue.  Since I run a course using cadavers in St. Louis, I can help bridge a hair-transplant assistant from foam tissue to a live model with more ease.  Just like in Phase 1 training, the goal is to master both graft dissection and graft placement.  However, it takes much longer to master graft dissection and oftentimes we do not teach clinical graft placement until graft dissection skills are initially mastered over many months of training.

Graft dissection training is focused on two skills:  slivering and individual graft dissection.  Slivering involves cutting single layers of hair grafts from a harvested strip. This is very similar to cutting a thin slice of bread from a loaf of bread.  The slivering process is perhaps one of the hardest skills to master.  Any wrong cut can make all subsequent cuts more difficult and also lead to a high number of transected and unusable follicles.  After slivering, the goal is to dissect the sliver into individual 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-hair grafts.  This process involves not only good hand-eye coordination but also judgment as to what constitutes a 1- versus a 2-hair graft and what should be kept and what should be discarded.  The goal with any training involves teaching both the skill of dissection and placement as well as the underlying judgment and critical thinking skills that should be part of the process.