FUE Vs. FUT Marketing Propaganda

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As most of, you know, there are really two principle ways of doing hair restoration or hair transplant surgery. There is FUE for the community excision and FUT transplant. FUT is a bit of a misnomer because both FUE and FUT uses the technique of transplantation. And that is transplanting single click of a unit grafts. However, it’s just become a sort of an abbreviation for the stripped procedures, also known as a single strip it and elliptical excision or SSCE. So bottom line for sake of ease, there are two methods, FUE and FUT. Nowadays there’s been gaining popularity of FUE, especially over the last five years. And there is a good reason for that the technique has gotten considerably better over this period of time. And there’s a lot of stuff on the internet that is either anti FUE or anti FUT a lot of times because the person only does FUE.

So they have to bad mouth, the strip procedure, or there is, strip doctors and only do strip procedures and they have to bad mouth FUE. So a lot of this stuff out there is all a lot of marketing, hype and propaganda that I find really, really terrible. So I want to talk to you not about the pros and cons of each procedure per se, because that takes another whole podcast. And I’ve done actually a lecture for the coming ISHRS meeting about my philosophy of the pros and cons. I may briefly touch upon that, but I want to wipe away a lot of the negative press about each procedure, because it’s used in an inappropriate way to scare patients from one or the other procedure because the doctor only performs one technique. So, first I want to address what you see online right now about the FUT procedure.

You see these websites or, you know, advertisements that showed the stripped procedure is outdated at the dinosaur. It’s scary cause you have this big ugly scar, whereas fue there’s no scar. So first of all, that’s absolutely Ronis the FET procedure had done well, may have a few of them. Don’t use a straight stretch back, but in most cases it can be so difficult to see that you can’t even see the incision unless you shave it, shave the head all the way down. So that’s the negative comment, but briefly, as I said, I will not talk about too much about the positives, but there are so many positives to strip procedure women in particular just makes no sense for me to do after you wean a vast majority of cages, because they’re never going to shave their head.

They don’t want to take donor hair from an area that’s not high quality, which is the temple area for them. And they also can feel it, any of the hair with FUE. It just, it’s not a great situation for most women. And also, you know, they have to shave their head or if they do a non shade technique, it takes two full days of their headline down on pillow. It’s just absolutely outrageous and crazy to me. So there were cases where strip procedure really does work well and including don’t total better preservation and get longer, longer tonight. I really want to do that in a separate podcast, but suffice it to say that the strip procedure, in terms of a beautiful incision, really, really is dependent on the surgeon doing it and really carefully picking the right patient. Not everyone should have a strip procedure.

But I think there’s all this terrible stuff online that denigrates FET or store procedures, because the people only certain only performs FUE and they don’t know how to do FUT. And they try to everyone who asks you mean it’s not the right answer. I want to talk about the flip side of this with doctors that only do strip procedures, talk about how bad FUE is. And that’s not the case today. I would say about five years ago, that was the case. So the biggest offense against FUE is that the grass don’t survive well because their skeleton, I stripped down there and damaged during harvesting and to be very Frank with you about five years ago, those grafts were not that awesome. The survival rate was significantly lower than after FUT and the grafts were scout life thin and did not survive quite as well.

I’ve always been able to handle the grafts well, despite that, and I’ve been doing FUE for many years now, but in the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot more of FUE because the improvement in the graft survival, and some studies have actually shown that survival and the identical, there are some caveats that I don’t want to go into too much detail with that. But the answer is that I actually, I think I did talk, I had a whole podcast about after you eat FUT graft survival. So you can listen to that podcast where I go to more detail. However, the FUT surgeons had say, you know, FUE is bad across the board cause FUE grafts don’t survive. That’s absolutely false. They have few grafts today survive almost on par with FUT, if not close to being that same level. So you’re going to hear people that only do strict procedures that say FUE grafts are horrible.

They don’t survive the terrible. And that was the case many years ago. It is really not the case today. I think the graft survival is very close and not on par with that, but there are some exceptions to that rule in terms of grafts are a little bit skeletonized and a little bit, a little bit splayed. But in general, the graft survival is really, really good. The other thing you’re going to hear about is, really diffused over harvesting. And unfortunately I’ve seen this and you talking about a linear scar of FUT that’s bad defuse overharvesting is the worst thing that can happen. We’re just someone way over harvest in the back, by inexperienced surgeon or a technicians that shouldn’t be doing it. And they have a complete loss of the backside of their scalp has thinned out completely and out.

And I’ve actually seen a double whammy, which is a patient that came to me. They had way over harvested FUE. Plus he had over harvested FUT with multiple strips. So he just had the most disastrous situation that I, I didn’t even know how to entirely fix, but I’ve been doing SMP or scout Mike and pigmentation to try to get somewhat decent when selected that FUE to cover the scars and the FUT basically disaster. But, um, overharvesting is something that’s there. And that’s why FUE does have a more limited total donor capacity for future harvest. You know, that’s going to be a topic of a different podcast, but for doctors that do FUT that say, look, you’re going to lose all your hairs, you know, with fue that’s again, over-marketing hype. That is terrible. So I don’t want to go into too much detail about all that, cause that’s, again, I can do podcasts on each of these subjects, but I do want to talk about how FUT surges about FUE being just horrible.

You know, that you’re going to see it, that FUE is scarless. And this is again, something that fue surgeons talk about against the FUT, which has a scar. Well, it’s true that FUT creates a linear scar, but it really FUE actually per scar has total total more square centimeter scars. And after UT it’s just not visible from a shorter hair distance, but when you shave all of it down, you actually have hypotension and white dots. It is not scarless. So people that say FUE is scarless again is over-marketing hype, which is used to sell something. So I really hope you, as a wise, consumer can cut through the garbage.